Skein
by fire-is-my-happy-place
Summary: A first person account of how the Joker seduced Harleen Quinzel, his betrayal of her, and her subsequent relationship with Poison Ivy. (A reinterpretation of the Mad Love story line) WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EMPATHETIC JOKER. DO NOT READ THIS EXPECTING A JOKER ANTI-HERO.
1. Chapter 1

I find it amusing, truly, that the courts keep assigning me to therapy sessions, as if the process of bagging and tagging my thoughts is going to do a damn thing to stop me. It seems to please them to put me in a box and send some terrified, or worse insufferably smug MD in to ask me questions about my family, to take notes on whatever tale I spin them and publish that he or she has finally figured me out. So far, I've had an alcoholic father, an alcoholic mother, a molesting babysitter and more cheap drama than one of those god awful afterschool specials the guard on the third floor insists on watching, full volume, in his cage. You would think that at some point, a few of these fuckers would swap notes and realize there is nothing consistent to be had. But each one seems to believe that they can sift me and find the final, ultimate, simple cause for my madness.

That, in my opinion, is what happens when you put dull but not entirely stupid people through an education system that sincerely argues for categorical classification. These hothouse flowers would be better served by going to a bar, getting in a fight, and for the love of sweet Chaos, getting laid. They'd be even better served by not going in the first place. If you can't teach it to yourself with a library—or through terrorizing the right people—you don't deserve to learn it.

When they sent her in, I have to be honest, I was planning on simply blurting out a rehashed version of daddy hit me. But boy, did they send in a hothouse flower—small, blonde, Boston accent, and shakier than a pure-bred poodle. I suppose you can't get to be an MD without some backbone, and assigned to Arkham unless you piss someone off. Or in her case, are trying to make your name. I know people find me a bit intimidating, and I'm usually not inclined to take to the help, but something about this one really got to me. I think it was because she was trying so hard, and so sincerely, to do a good job. Say what you like about my various 'crime' sprees, but I hate incompetence and apathy. I will gleefully blow a man's head off for being a useless sack of shit. It improves the world.

It didn't hurt that she was cute in a please-don't-hurt-me way, and only slightly less clumsy than a puppy.

But who names their daughter Harleen?

I had to push her a little, just a little, to see what made her flinch. The answer is practically everything: sudden movements, the first hint of violence, and she went up like a torch at innuendo. Either they've gotten much better about baiting their traps—and that ain't likely—or they really did send some girl fresh on her first psychiatry rotation into Arkham to talk to me. The thing a lot of people don't understand about me is that I'm only malicious under certain circumstances: if I'm bored, if I'm surrounded by useless sacks of shit, or if someone is droning on at me about how great everything is out there. My first thought is that she'd pissed someone off, that they'd sent her in here with me so that I'd bark at her like a rabid dog.

I'm not that easily leashed, and like any weapon, you have to keep your charm sharp.

* * *

The prisoner is… The prisoner is not stupid. I can't write that on the report. I can't write any of the other things I want to write either, that the prisoner is tired of being treated like he's stupid, or that he probes to see what makes people flinch.

Okay, so I am terrified of him. Who wouldn't be? He seems to skip in and out of Arkham as if this is his vacation home. And when he's out there, in Gotham, he racks up millions of dollars in property damage, bodies up to his ears—he's not short—and seems to delight in causing the most terror possible, striking at beloved city landmarks, prestigious institutions, and any other symbol of civic unity he can, flailing at them as if it insults him to have to see people going about their everyday lives.

I wish someone had told me how magnetic he is before I managed to get access to him. He's not a pretty man. Once they washed the makeup off, he's actually rather ugly—he's scarred, sharp-featured, his mouth is over-wide and his hair is a greasy mop. But there's a sort of furious intelligence pouring off of him. Talking to him is like playing chess with an atom bomb. He's constantly trying this move or that, learning, adapting, coming back with something new, with the certainty that he has something important to say, and that he can figure you out. Only the truly narcissistic or sociopaths are that certain, and yet…

And yet he's too aware of me to be a narcissist, and far too concerned with social structures to be a sociopath. He watches me so closely, so very closely.

I've had a lot of people give me the look over the years, but nobody that's made me feel like my skin could come off with my clothes. He's not just looking at you, he's looking through you and reading the contents. I haven't ever felt that naked when someone has looked at me before. Not professors, not other inmates, not any boyfriend, nobody. The first few minutes of the session I really thought he was going to jump over the table and hurt me. And then, all of the sudden, he smiled, like he'd read something he liked. And after that, he was compliant. I don't know if he's lying to me, but he was compliant.

He was even charming, which is scary. I can see why he'd have followers, even though as far as we can tell he kills as many of them as anything else does. He just looks at you and smiles, like you're the most interesting person on the earth. I don't know if he's flirting or just bored.

Mostly, he appears to be bored with people. I've seen him eyeballing the guards, the other inmates, reading in his cell—and what kind of prisoner has a taste for classic literature?—and a few times, on camera, getting even with someone one way or the other. You can never tell with him whether it'll be a shiv or a cream pie, or at least the footage I've watched has seemed a little random. He just gets even and laughs, cackling so wildly that he ends up sagging against the wall. He looks gutted by his own laughter, but I've seen him bounce up out of the sag whip-quick and mean when he needed to.

They tell me that getting a clear idea what his sense of humor is actually like would be enough to net me a tenure track job somewhere nice, dangling it in front of me like the proverbial golden apple in Greek myths. He's certainly mean, but not… I don't know how to describe it. He likes to push people, and he thinks less of them if they don't push back.

I wasn't expecting him to be this smart. Blue collar crime is usually associated with low intelligence. I was prepared for him to be barely literate, or simply unable to be subtle, but he's not. He's incredibly capable of subtlety—trying out various ways of trying to get me to talk about myself, suggestions about how to understand him, all the while watching me to see what I respond to.

I didn't mean to blush when he said what he did about shaky blondes. I know we're not supposed to respond to those kinds of comments, but it came out of the blue and I just didn't know what to say. So I blushed.

And he smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

If she isn't bait, then I rolled a seven when she got assigned to me—blind chance and a natural for the come out. Time will tell if the dice keep flipping my way, but I'm optimistic. She's vulnerable in the best ways for this kind of thing, from the transparent tendency to blush and duck her head when confronted with a little innuendo to that fact that she's so goddamn small. I mean, really, I could pick her up and turn her into a naked pretzel without breaking a sweat and well before the guards got into the room to save her.

Lest you get the idea that I only go for a particular kind of girl, I don't really have any preferences in the formal sense. Some men will tell you that they love blondes, or brunettes, that they're ass men or leg men or tit men, and in doing so tell me that they have a sad lack of imagination and no ability to understand how ridiculous they are. I feel a little sorry for them, to be honest, that they look at the riot of flesh around them and say "I only want that sliver right there." Kids, the world is full of places to get your rocks off, and all you do if you only want one person is handcuff yourself to boredom and lose the key.

If any of those MDs were clever enough to ask, I would have told them that everything is about fucking but fucking, by which I mean fucking is about power. And once you understand that, you know that fucking is nice enough, but really getting your rocks off is about what happens in your brain. Or in my case, what happens in everyone else's brain, complacent fuckers that they are.

They never are smart enough to ask, so I never have to answer that question. I'd probably lie anyway, just because I can and they're too stupid to put the picture together. If I met me, I'd be able to put it together—I don't give two shits what you look like. I'm after something different.

What I'm looking for is a deliciously vulnerable brain and something meaty between the ears that I can get my hands on and play with. The world is full of dumb motherfuckers who move through their day like someone carved it on their bones, comfortable and complacent as a rock in a field no matter what happens to them. Even in my particular line of work, if you can call it that, stupid is the rule and not the exception.

There's something going on under that adorable librarian bun and sweater thing she has going on. She's trying laughably hard to fit in, to be as unexceptionally normal as possible, which just tells me there's something going on under that librarian act.

I can see it in the way she looks at me, head cocked and actually listening. The thing about the MDs they normally send in that drives me a little batty—if you'll pardon the pun—is that they don't listen. They have a form in their head, and they twist anything I say to fit in it. It's a waste of time to try and convince them individually to listen, so unless I see something really interesting, I just give them things to put in the blank. For the most part, whatever academic brilliance got them through med school is exhausted by the time they get to me, so there's not much to play with.

I do keep track of what I tell them. It's a discipline, keeping track of details and things that pull people's chains, and one that you have to practice to be any good at manipulating them. Sure, there's native talent—a rare enough occurrence—but you can't coast by on instinct. Chance throws up opportunities, and you have to be ready for them. The practice just makes getting my hands on something juicy even better.

And she is juicy, a juicy little hot mess. I intend to get into her head and play with the contents until she understands what she's asking for and begs me to do more. And she will. My mama didn't raise no slouch—did you think, when I said 'mama' that I was giving you important background material? I could have said anything there and for all you know it would be true—and chance saw fit to give me a double helping of what is conveniently referred to as intelligence. Most people beg to be manipulated, giving up autonomy and self-reflection as if they can't bear to have it, but they have no idea what they're asking for or even what it means. I wouldn't punish them so hard for being shallow if they had any fucking clue that they were shallow. But they don't, so I get to be chaos' own punisher. Suits me just fine.

But this one? This one might actually be able to understand it, and I can't wait to get my hot little fingers inside her head.

The last two sessions, she's played with her pen endlessly, fidgeting at it by drawing it through the loop of her fingers and running them down it. If I were a man with less self-control, I would have burst out laughing right there. It's not just that she is, quite literally, jerking off her pen, it's that she appears to not know that she's jerking off her pen. Shit, I was expecting a little more subtlety in the signs of it, but if she wants to make this easier, I'll take it. She flushes often when I talk about anything that could possibly be taken as innuendo. I asked her last time if she likes orchids and I think she actually stopped breathing for a moment, pink as a dick and twice as likely to shrink in the cold.

When she asks questions, she searches my face, and even a little twitch makes her get this really interesting expression of discovery. Ordinarily, I view the slight arch of the eyebrows and quick, out of sequence blink as a flag that I've found something they want to believe, but she doesn't go immediately to write what she thinks. Instead, she assembles. Closely, carefully, listening and comparing—the gooey bits between her ears are practically giving off sparks. And when she does write something, the way she's put it together gives her a bat's chance in hell of understanding it. I told her last time that I enjoy interpreting those ink blots they're forever showing me, and instead of writing some of the stupid shit I've read upside-down over the years—my favorite is that I have a frustrated desire to please—she wrote that I enjoy constructing narratives in response to the reactions I get. And then, sexy little thing that she is, she added a question mark.

Look, people put their conclusions before their observations all the goddamn time. It's how the MD who wrote frustrated desire to please got told the story about how mommy was so cold and mean, including poorly hidden tears and a rant about how women are mean to me. The truth is that women, like men, bend over backward to please with a little carefully applied pressure.

He went on to publish about my misogyny, and I nearly shit myself laughing when I got my hands on the paper. The next person to publish got to hear a story about how daddy was always distant, and wrote a paper about latent homosexual desires that had warped my ability to connect meaningfully with others. That paper was equally funny. I re-read them when I need a laugh.

By the time the last session was over, I'd learned quite a bit more about her than she has me. She's attracted to me and she doesn't want to be. She originally thought I was stupid and now she's afraid I may be smarter than her, and it's playing merry hell with her sense of being valuable because of her degree. She has also never run into anyone with my talents—hot-house flowers again—and has absolutely no idea that you ought to be wary of flattery.

I left her with the statement that I enjoy the company of intelligent women. This time, when she blushed, she looked up at me, making the kind of hot eye contact you get from people who are convincing themselves that you think they're valuable.

Well, she's right about that, but completely wrong about why.

* * *

I have to stop playing cat and mouse with him, but I get the impression he plays those kinds of games like he breathes. To be honest, it's pretty clear to me that his IQ is high enough to make therapy kind of moot. He knows way too much about psychology, whether it's just natural talent or the voracious reading he does, for anyone to be able to easily diagnose him. At this point, I think he may just be a brand new category of dysfunction, though I concur with my predecessors that he's a psychopath of some kind.

He's missing a variety of things. Remorse is the easiest to see, since if you ask him about his crimes he just laughs at you. But there's more than that. Every psychiatry student learns at least a little bit about the way people construct their understanding and how that colors what they perceive. That's just 101 level exposure to different categories of abnormal psychology and a little cultural studies. But he's… fluid. He appears to move between different kinds of abnormalities for the amusement of watching people try to assign him a single category. I've read the papers on him. Who knows if he's actually straight or gay, or if he was molested, or if his father or mother were violent? He's certainly not going to tell the truth. But for one person, he quite convincingly and sincerely gave off every sign of having borderline personality disorder. For another, he quite convincingly and sincerely gave off every sign of being schizophrenic, including a recorded monologue that, I have to admit, was ingeniously spattered with disorganized thinking and a touch of megalomania.

I don't believe any of it, having met him, but he could be playing a game with me in that way as well.

The really amazing part is that he knows enough to add little errors, or little inconsistencies, to prevent the person listening to him from thinking the story he's telling them is too perfectly constructed. Slightly different retellings of the same event, slightly different details: the kind of impact time would have on memories of an event.

The kind of self-control and detail that requires him to keep track of is mind-boggling. I met one of the people who'd written on him at a conference once—if ever there was an example of the phrase "stuffed shirt"—and the transcript makes it clear that he actually tailored his errors to fit this person's preconceptions of him.

He's also missing… and I don't know how to put this any other way… a sense of social structures as being particularly valuable. It's not that he doesn't recognize that others find them valuable, or that he doesn't understand why. He's too good at manipulation not to understand that. It's that he thinks they're …

I can only really put questions here. Not so much useless as in the way? Or maybe just soporific? Maybe he's just suffering from cynicism about what good they actually do. He has a sort of oddly world-weary way of describing things and obvious anger about the way people drift through life. The statements he leaves at crimes and the things he attacks make that pretty clear.

I have no idea why, but it's disturbing. Usually, we see that sort of thing in people who've been neglected, or abused, or somehow just didn't get socialized during various critical windows in development. But I'm not sure that the cause is that simple, and he doesn't really exhibit the signs of abuse or the habitual signs of being the victim of violence. He doesn't flinch, he doesn't cringe, he doesn't avoid anything that I can tell, he doesn't exhibit the long term effects of high-stress arousal, and he doesn't have nightmares. We watch him when he sleeps—he appears to sleep like a baby.

Is it really possible to resent those institutions without a specific incident? How does he not find them comforting? How is it that he does not find repetition and predictability necessary, or for that matter an important part of establishing society?

What is he actually looking for, when he looks at me and smiles?

I can't publish any of this.

I don't have the clout and reputation necessary to feud with the kind of big names who've already examined him. Even if I did, what does it say about psychiatry that we're this able to be manipulated by someone with, as far as we can tell, no formal education worth mentioning? We don't even know if he finished high school, because we don't know who the hell he actually is. Somehow, even during this period of time, where there's records for everything, there's no particular records for him outside his crimes. It's as if he was invisible before he started burning things down.

He's more terrifying now that he's talking to me than he was when I thought he was going to jump the table and kill me. It's terrifying to sit there at the table and listen to him talk about all these institutions and feel myself start to question them, and start to wonder, even if it's just for a second, if going to school, going to work, paying the bills and every other form of social compliance isn't just… futile, somehow.

When he moves, I'm as aware of him as I am of myself. It's not just a matter of caution—we've all had the training, I'm cautious—it's like I'm a tuning fork and I'm being tapped.

I need a drink.


	3. Chapter 3

I'll give Nigma this much: he's a clever motherfucker when he wants to be. It's kind of sad that he's so eager to prove himself. He'd be much better served by spending less time trying to force the world to see that he's brilliant and more time punishing them for being stupid. When we see each other at mess or the halls, we do the professional courtesy nod and occasionally talk. Of all the batty motherfuckers in here with me, Nigma is the closest to understanding my motivation. Two-face shares my love of chance, but talking to him is like listening to two people fight and you can't get much out of him in terms of consistent thoughts. Catwoman is adorably and admirably self-interested, but she doesn't really have the kind of vision I've got, and old Bats talks her head around on a regular basis. Zsasz is… look, people speculate about my sexuality on occasion, and sometimes they'll argue that what I do is a kind of hyper-sexuality. I'm not ruled by my nuts. Victor is ruled entirely by his, taking contract work as a convenience to get his rocks off. I'd use him, but I can't really talk to him.

Nigma has a version of the same vision that drives me, but he's hampered by this child-like pleading for the world to give him the recognition he thinks he deserves. It's a critical flaw, and it's frustrating, but he's the only other inmate I can really talk to.

We're not going to discuss Croc, because while I have a strong stomach, I'd like to keep what passes for food around here down.

Nigma got assigned to her as well, and the last time we talked, we swapped notes on her. She doesn't do the same body language with him as she does me: the jerking off her pen, the blushing, the hot eye contact. Instead, with Nigma, she has figured out that he likes riddles, so she's written her questions for him in the form of riddles. This means a couple of things—first, that she is really observant. Nigma will ask riddles on occasion when he's particularly exasperated by someone or just to rub their nose in how smart he is, but no one really plays with him that way. He's probably done a little critical over-sharing with her out of sheer surprise. Second, and this is the sexy part, she's manipulating him purposefully. Most people are ham-handed as fuck when they manipulate, and while I don't think she's anywhere near as good at it as I am, the fact that she can do it is… I don't wank on camera unless I think it's going to help me convince some stupid fuck of something, but I was tempted when I finished talking to Nigma.

That hot mess between her ears gets better every week when we meet.

The fun thing is that I can just see her starting to doubt. It's in a variety of things: she blinks a lot when we're talking. She stares at me, her eyebrows creeping up and together, her mouth falling open slightly, murmuring things to herself as we talk, forgetting to take notes. I managed to coax her to talk a little about her student loans last time. I read the news. I know what kind of money she probably owes. I also know they pay the interns here shitty amounts of money—I could pay off her student loans in a week or so, all $150k of them. But why would I? And why would she?

That's a lot of fucking money for a piece of paper and thirty or so years of putting up with guys like us.

When I told her that, she flinched: a good, full body flinch. I could just see her imagination stacking the years up, her hair going gray, her student loans taking twenty years to pay off, going home to what is very probably an empty apartment, trying to take satisfaction in publishing a few things, maybe teaching and praying she's able to get the classes.

I'm not really the protective sort, but if she's smart enough to manipulate, she's way too smart for that life, chained by convention to the slow grind of normality. She's too smart to let time turn her into a dull shadow. This whole process is starting to take a shape. We have a lot of time in our cells to contemplate life, the universe, and everything—I usually read and study. Last night, I spent it thinking about the way this is stacking up.

If she keeps showing signs of having a functioning brain, I'm going to take her under my wing and make something out of her. It can't hurt, and that was originally what I wanted, to have a tool on staff. But the more I learn about her, the more personal the urge to twist her gets. I'm not suggesting I want to settle down and have children—good god, that's a disgusting thought—but I am saying that I think she might be one of us. Or she could be, given the right mentor.

I think I'm going to keep working at making her see how ridiculous the institutions she lives inside are. She sees it, somewhere back there under all the responses she's learned to parrot—I've seen her looking around on the catwalk over the general area, with just the faintest touch of bewildered disgust on her face. And when I talk to her about their failings, about the kind of lives people lead if they don't luck into the right birth, her face gets solemn and sometimes even angry, like she shares, for just a moment, a tiny fraction of my disgust with them.

Mind you, she's not aggressive or manipulative enough to be anything but a sidekick, but there's a kind of craftsman's pleasure in shaping a mind with the right potential. It's a whole hell of a lot less boring than waiting for the next opportunity to go out and wreak merry havoc in this city.

* * *

He got me to talk about student loans today. I didn't mean to, but we started chatting about the news and the protests. Unemployment is high right now, and a lot of grads simply can't find work. The only reason I have a job here is because I had an old boyfriend on staff, and he was nice enough to vouch for me.

When he said what he did about it being too much money for a piece of paper—he has an uncanny knack for finding vulnerable spots. I keep watching the bills stack up, and it's not like I don't know that the loan companies own my ass for the foreseeable future. They only pay us enough at Arkham for me to share an apartment with another new graduate in the shittiest neighborhood in Gotham, and to make the minimum payments on everything. I sleep like shit because I keep wondering if I'll ever manage to get a really good job, or be able to save for retirement, or even to just get out to the bar for drinks without having to spend money I should be using for groceries.

And honestly, what person hasn't left graduate school without wondering what the fuck it's all for? The minute you get past easy undergraduate classes, they confront you with all the shit no one knows, all the limitations on what we can do, and ask you to come to some kind of conclusion on it. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I'm nowhere near dumb enough to miss the fact that my degree and the whole psychiatric profession relies on people believing there are types, and that the mind can be changed, and the essential willingness to spill your guts in front of someone who can cure you.

What people don't know is that we can't cure most of it. We can just teach people how to manage minor problems, medicate them until they're not actively miserable, tell them everything is fine the way it is and their perceptions are the problem, and take their money. Serious personality disorders, like the mix of psychopathy and whatever else he has, are intractable. We try to teach them social skills, to evangelize the pleasures of compliance and getting along with others, but that's all we can do, short of medicating them enough to make it hard for them to hurt people or even to think or sending them to institutional care.

People like him, we try to learn from, but they stay a cautionary tale on how different human minds can be.

The public likes to romanticize people like him, which doesn't help if the person being romanticized has even a little meglomania—the public appears to be titillated by him in a weird way, avidly following his crimes from a distance as if he was born to be public theater. They want him to act out the things they can't express in their everyday lives.

If this seems like a strange thing to say, we turn away groupies all day long at Arkham. I'm almost certain several of the guards idolize him, and he gets a stream of letters that tell him that he's doing what the writer wishes they could. He has online fan groups, people all over the world who keep shrines to him.

It's … creepy. These people haven't even met him in person, but they're busy calling him their hero, writing fan fiction about him and discussing what they think is his philosophy. I spent hours last night reading those sites.

I'm sure he knows how the public feels, or at least the part of the public that keeps writing him letters—and there are a ton of letter writers. He also gets some internet access time, and while we've never logged him visiting one of those sites, he has to know about them.

I can't help but think of his terrorist activities as performances, but I'm not sure which group of people he's playing to. His performances are too calculated to be simply random, and he makes them as public as possible. He also makes them as horrible as possible, as if part of the reason he lashes out is because he knows that there are groups of people out there hungry to watch him act out their rage.

Sometimes it looks to me like he wants to punish them for it. Sometimes I wonder if he's trying to get others to participate with him.

Is he a revolutionary or simply angry? I'm sure he won't tell me. If he is trying to spur a revolution, he picked a good time for it.

I've watched the same news footage of the student protests six times now, and the footage of Gotham PD responding in riot gear. These are people who are supposed to be the leaders of tomorrow. They did everything they were supposed to do—went to school, passed their courses, got their piece of paper, and now they have no job, can't pay the bills, credit worsening and unable to get a job because of that as well, their whole adult lives pissing down the tubes along with their faith in the promise of education.

I watch them and it scares me, because if it wasn't for my ex, I might be down there with GPD cracking my head open. It's fragile as hell, this position I'm in, and there's no promise Arkham won't get rid of me tomorrow.

Those students out there, getting beaten and pepper-sprayed, did everything they were supposed to do and it didn't make their lives better. I did everything I was supposed to do and I have what's probably going to be a dead end job.

I'm going to polish that bottle of vodka in the freezer off tonight. I can't keep thinking about this sober.


	4. Chapter 4

She looks ratty as fuck right now—big bags under her eyes, the god awful florescent lighting here making her greenish. From her wince at the noise, I'm going to guess she's also hung over. If I were that kind of guy, I'd feel guilty. Fortunately for me, I'm not, but I'll pretend a little to keep her talking about herself.

When she told me about watching the protestor footage… I'm winning this one, and in record time. She's taking our conversations home with her, taking them home and contemplating them in what I'd be willing to bet is the world's mousiest set of flannel pajamas, probably chewing her lip like she does when she's thinking.

She's watching the news with new eyes and re-thinking about her world. If I believed Chaos was personified—and I'm sorry it isn't, because I'd bang Eris like a screen door in a hurricane—I'd have to thank it. The protests by all those suckers who sold their future for an education, the increasingly violent response of the GPD, the mild contempt I've seen her colleagues treat her with, all of those timely things I don't control lining up like dominos. She's not quite ready for the push, but we're getting there all the faster for the news.

This time, I got her to talk about her family for a little while before she realized she was over-sharing and clammed up, frantically grabbing her notes and running out of the room twenty minutes before we were scheduled to end the session.

It's no surprise to me that she didn't come from money—her clothes are worn, she's just a little too quick to anger when I talk about what the rich get away with, and she flinched like I'd shivved her when I talked about student loans.

What I did find surprising is that her childhood wasn't unhappy. It wasn't much of anything.

Chance, again, rolling the dice. Plain, boring, blue collar family, first in her family to go to grad school, all that bubbling resentment for students whose families could help them foot the bill, and she came out of that process with enough left of herself to still be curious, to still try and observe. She must have taken those lectures on the scientific method way more seriously than any of the other MDs I've talked to. She's still trying to do it right, still seems to think that people are really concerned with how true something is and not just things they like to hear.

It's kind of cute that she's an idealist, especially since she's still an idealist after however many years she spent in grad school. In my own way, I'm an idealist, too. I don't know if it means she can share the kind of grand vision I have for this whole process, but that inclination right there…. I can use that.

Idealists are funny, because for the most part if they can't have it the way they want it, they're willing to burn the idea of it down in their heads for disappointing them. The trick is persuading them to burn it down outside their heads. For your garden variety criminal, all you really have to do is remind them how angry they are that they didn't get what they wanted out of life, and how society deserves to suffer because it hurt their feelings or fucked them up. Shallow, I know, but effective.

The only things they really identify with are things that affect them personally. That guy who cut them off in traffic. That judge who sent them down. That lawyer who didn't do a good enough job on their defense. The child support system or the prisons, some institution which they have a personal reason to hate. Tunnel vision is the easiest thing in the world to use for manipulation.

Ever so often I run into one who can take it a step further, and starts asking why the people who look like them end up in situations that fuck them. Honestly, I get a little bit excited when I run into that. I tend to make them my lieutenants, because they start to grasp the problem. They still have tunnel vision, and if you ask them what they want to do, they can't tell you what the problem is and how to fix it. They just know a little bit about how to lash out, and I give them all the opportunities they want to do that, offering them assignments that let them bomb court buildings, or rob the banks that have robbed them, or simply to spread terror in the kind of people they dislike.

Rarely, oh so rarely, I run into one who has some questions about the institutions around them. Those are my upper management, as it were. They still don't get the scope of the problem, but they start to understand that the problem is bigger than them or the people they like the best. I teach them a little about manipulation, just enough to help them figure out how to assign tasks to the dumbest fuckers.

I don't actually have to assign people things they like, but they work harder when I let them do things they enjoy. I keep a little core of sadists, lead about by their nuts, to keep order, and I keep order on them. I understand them, but they have that same failure of vision that bugs the fuck out of me in other people. Their charm is that they're honest about what they like.

I've been thinking about how to type her—there may be some latent sadistic urges in her, as well as that lucky ability to think about what's wrong with the full picture. I'm getting a slightly masochistic vibe from her as well. She appears to feel… maybe justified is too strong a word. It's probably closer to she expects and is satisfied to be proved right in her expectation that she'll be stomped on. There's a lot of anger back there about it. Whenever I talk about things like her job, she does this little thing where she grits her teeth, her jaw protruding slightly, and her nostrils flare a little, and then she recovers and hides it.

Her self-control is a part of what makes her attractive.

And then she comes back for more. If she ever looks slightly bored, or even seems to be distracted, I can get her right back on track with just the tiniest reminder of the way the staff treats her, or the struggles she went through to finish school. She keeps coming back, leaning just a little over the table, eyes on me like there's nothing else in the fucking world. I swing every which way when it pleases me, but being sadistic is one of those things I get an extra charge out of. She leans into that little unpleasant charge of pain, literally leaning across the table as if she can't get enough.

I said I understand the sadists. I wasn't kidding. She is ringing every bell I've got for masochist.

When she leans over the table slightly, I can see down her shirt. I don't think she's aware of that either, too caught up in listening to me, in responding. Tying her into a naked sweaty pretzel gets more attractive every time we talk, but we aren't at full dependence yet, so I'm not going to play that card.

I can't wait, though, to see her face when she realizes she is dependent and has to confront all those naughty little masochistic urges that got her there. Lord, I love an honest face, and most people need to be led there at gun-point.

I've spent a lot of time learning from various criminals, and then perfecting their processes. I spent an interesting and enlightening year hanging out with pimps—speaking of manipulators, they've raised sexual manipulation to an art form. The best of them are practiced, thoughtful, cold-blooded, and very effective. I've watched them find lonely girls and women, flatter the shit out of them, fuck them within an inch of dying by orgasm, teach them to be dependent, and then wean them off the pimp's attention and turn them out. Only the particularly unskilled ones use drugs. A good fuck appears to suffice, and it's cheaper. It's also more effective in terms of longevity. Addiction makes a girl lose her looks faster and doesn't do a damn thing for the girl's willingness to do anything to please if the pimp has any skill at all.

She's lonely and good god is she sexually frustrated. After I've twisted her head around enough, fucking her will be the cherry atop the hot mess sundae. I'll have to wean her off it at some point, or maybe she'll just turn out to be the kind of woman who doesn't need to be convinced she's the center of my universe. Either way, it's another tool I keep sharp, and when I cut her open it'll be with more than my cock.

* * *

I've re-read my notes, and it's pretty clear that he's had a devastating effect on the way I think. I am having trouble conducting interviews with other prisoners. I'm just not sure that anything I'm doing here is helping anyone. In fact, I'm not sure that I'm not making things worse by being a part of the process.

I'm going to resign from working with him, and I'm going to start talking to a psychologist of my own. I can't … I can't figure out what the point of it is, and I'm not sure there's even a point to me going to talk to another professional.

Are we really doing any good here? Does any of this even help, or do we just apply drugs and double-talk to keep people quiet?

I can't watch the news without hearing his voice, patiently explaining what's wrong with it and the students and the banks and the education system and every other system I interact with. I don't understand how he did it, but he is so much more dangerous than any warning I could possibly print would suggest. Even if they gagged him, he'd be dangerous.

That core of fans he has online… I wonder if they're just admiring or if any of them have tried to emulate him. I wonder if he's ever tried to push them to emulate him, or even if he has to. The news has been full of police violence recently. Cuts to social programs, unemployment, the potential for war as countries flare up at each other: people seem on edge.

If I'm totally honest, I have to admit I'm on edge. I just keep thinking about how long it's going to take me to pay my loans off, about this miserable job and how grateful I should be to have any job at all.

I just keep hearing him tell me how pointless this all is, and even though I know I shouldn't agree, he feels right.

It feels pointless.

I feel pointless.

I'm extensively trained, and I'm not precisely dumb. We're interacting in a controlled environment, and I knew he was a psychopath when I came in. I've seen footage of his crimes. I knew he was a liar and manipulative when I walked into the room the first time.

Despite all the preparation, he's still managed to change my mind, to make it all seem meaningless. The worst of it is that he's repeating to me all those nagging little thoughts I've had at four am, when I couldn't sleep. Somehow, he knows about all those little thoughts and is patiently feeding them back to me, holding up a twisted mirror and showing me things I should know better than to feel and cannot quite ignore.

Who hasn't wondered what it's all for? Who hasn't wondered why their education had to be so expensive, and why some people get lucky and are born into money? Who hasn't wondered what it might be like to not constantly worry about money, or wanted to stop being constantly afraid that something will break and they won't be able to pay their bills?

Existential doubt is totally normal, I know it is. God, practically half our job is consoling people who are experiencing existential doubt. The other half of what we do is consoling ourselves. No one spends this much time examining the human mind without developing some serious questions about what kind of person they are, questions that they have to grapple with or at least come to a different understanding of them so they can get through life normally.

You can't spend this much time examining other people's sanity without having some questions about your own.

Who doesn't take abnormal psychology and see themselves? Who doesn't take structural psychology, or behavioral psychology, and wonder just how instinctual we are and how little we seem to make decisions for ourselves?

There's something about him that takes those little cracks and widens them into gaping faults. Talking to him is like reliving all those conversations with myself in the middle of the night. I never did find any answers for those questions, and he just keeps bringing them up.

Those questions have teeth. Who am I? What the hell do I think I'm doing?

But most important: why? Why am I doing this? What do I think is going to happen?

Why do I keep thinking about him?

If I do go talk to someone, I am sure as fuck not telling them about the dreams. Arkham will fire my ass if I they find out that I keep dreaming about sex with the man. I want to chalk it up to frustration—it's been awhile—or maybe to the way he looks at me, the odd sympathetic bond that seems to have formed between us. But whatever it is, the last time I masturbated, I kept seeing his face, hearing his voice in my ear, whispering. And in my dreams, he rips my clothes off and fucks me violently on the table in the interview room. Sometimes it's hard to even pay attention to what he's saying when I'm in the room with him.

He can see it. I can see him responding to it, leaning forward slightly and tweaking me to get a response.

And he smiles. And I blush.

There is something seriously fucking wrong with me.


	5. Chapter 5

Nigma and I are going to have to have a little chat, right after I finish convincing her that she's okay. I know she keeps notes. They all do, and hers are probably more interesting than your average MDs. She apparently re-read them lately, once again she's proving smarter than I thought she'd be, because she was able to track the changes in her thinking from them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, considering their training, but it's inconvenient as hell. The human brain is not terribly capable of introspection unless you give it a good hard shock, and this kind of manipulation is easiest when they don't have time to think about it, or just don't have anything to compare themselves to.

Her loneliness is a real asset. I just have to make sure she stays lonely and stays the hell away from her notes. As long as she keeps re-reading the notes or has anyone around her to compare herself to, she'll keep trying to pull away.

I'm lucky—chance again, looking after its favorite son—that she bothered to say goodbye. Guilt, I have to say, is one of my favorite things about your average fucker. She felt guilty that we'd talked this much and this intimately, that she'd failed her own understanding of what a professional should be, and felt like she owed me an apology and farewell. I had to think fast when she came in, but being a criminal is handy for moments like that. I could see that apology coming, and the best way to disrupt the guilty is to prevent them from being able to go through with their little rituals of obeisance.

So I apologized to her first. I apologized for putting pressure on her, for any act I might have done that made her feel uncomfortable. And she sat there with her mouth open, cheeks flaming red, as well she should.

A word about me and apologies: I don't. I don't apologize for shit. Not only do I lack the guilt for it, but I don't do anything unintentionally, and never unprovoked.

She knows this. I've never apologized to the court, never apologized to the families, never apologized to the city, not to a therapist or any of my various professional contacts.

If it looks like I handed her a weapon, it's because you expect me to feel bad if she uses it. Not in this or any other lifetime, if I believed in that sort of shit, would I feel bad about having given her a completely insincere apology—though I made sure she'd believe it.

Another move in our little game. The fact that she feels guilty just tells me she has no idea what game we're playing.

And then, while she was reeling from the apology, I kept her reeling with flattery. The thing about her is that if you flatter her looks, she'll shrug it off. She's fully armored against it, having dealt with the various slings and arrows aimed at her for being a petite blonde her whole life.

Hey, I listen to the guards. I listen to the other docs, and the techs, and everyone around me. I know exactly what kind of comments they tend to aim at her. She has a nickname on the ward—they call her the bitty bait. She's tiny, cute, and obviously fragile as fuck, but touching her will get you put in solitary.

I know she's heard it. They ain't a subtle group.

Nobody, and I do mean nobody, has flattered the gooey bits between her ears. The thing a lot of people don't understand about people like us, to the degree she's like me, is that we come by our alienation honestly. Bit by stinking bit, we tally the ways we're different and the ways people punish us for it.

Of course, that makes it sound like we're doing it on purpose. To that, I respond that we don't have to. You people tell us about it every day, all day, and what you don't say, we get because humans are stupid fucking monkeys and we mirror each other unconsciously all the damn time. The brains between her ears are different, and different usually means rejected. Even if I didn't know that, I'd have known by the way her shoulders hunch slightly when we talk about the future, and how painfully cautious she is about correcting anybody and the very fact that she never says shit to anyone, no matter what they call her.

I can see that she wants to—that girl burns to do something violent about it—but she also knows it won't help and that she has to keep this job. So she says nothing and does nothing, no matter what they do.

I've been following her, nothing so obvious as stalking, but simply being in the area while she's pacing the catwalk, or listening at the door before she comes in. I am patient like a spider when I want to be, when I'm interested in something. There's a pleasure to catharsis, to the acts of terrorism I commit against dull obedience, but people tend to forget that pulling one of those off requires planning, which requires patience. The only person who seems to quite understand that, other than Nigma and Penguin, is old Bats. You wouldn't think so, rich bastard that he is—I mean, really, look at his million dollar toys—but he appears to have enough self-control to understand planning. It's what makes him particularly fun to play with.

I told her the one thing every single one of us wants to hear—that I'd been so candid with her because I knew she was smart enough to understand what I had to say.

Kids, alloy your lies with truth whenever possible, just to confuse the issue and make it harder for them to figure out what's going on.

She looked up at me then, all doe-eyes and stun, and I delivered the coup de grâce: that I'd been so candid with her because she was smart enough to understand me.

I know I'm the prize in this fucked-up carnival. Publishing an accurate paper on me would give her the kind of job and praise that would launch her academic career. She craves and has given up on recognition, and is trying to resign herself to plodding along in the same ugly rut for her entire career. Ignored, shunted aside, given shit work and treated like she's inferior to the people around her, to the men around her.

I'd be a dumb motherfucker indeed if I didn't know about that particular dynamic.

Hope is an entertaining emotion—she lit up like a thin curtain over a candle. I could see her trying to reason with herself, trying to contain her excitement, trying to remind herself of the fact that I am, after all, a psychopath and all around bad man by their measurement.

It consumed her anyway, month after month of my patient work planting the seeds, reminding her of the violence in the city, asking her questions about the worth of her degree, flattering her mind, talking about the need for change, and the need for people to get the chance to grow, and the millions of failures big and small that litter the city because the same institutions that grudgingly let her in gleefully keep everyone else out.

She's spent twelve years learning to be a doctor and psychiatrist, twelve years learning to support, affirm, and work within a system. Twelve years learning the right responses and habits, the right way to think.

I've just made those twelve years disappear. Really, I'd take a bow if I were among peers who could understand the magic trick I just performed. I just pulled a woman out of a collection of rule books and shitty routines.

Greed and self-interest really are the skeleton keys of personality.

She looked at me again, really looked, and this time she was an open book, without reservation or defensiveness. She didn't just want to believe me, she _needed_ to believe me. She needed to believe me because otherwise her entire professional life, all the comments she'd put up with, and all the shitty little gestures she'd had to endure, were pointless.

I offered her everything she's ever wanted, and I made her work for it first to make sure she felt like she deserved it. Before she said a word, I knew she would take it. She'll stay, and inch-by-inch I'm going to warp this to sex and dependency. It won't take me long.

Then, I'm going to show her every last cold-blooded decision I made to get her here.

And finally, I'm going to teach her to beg for it, knowing exactly what it means.

Nigma is going to help me do it. A little… poetic justice, as it were, for all the annoyingly needy comments I've had to put up with to have a conversation with him.

* * *

He's probably just flattering me. I know he's probably just flattering me. This is all probably a ploy he's put together for some unknowable reason of his own, whether just out of boredom, or because he has something in mind. I'm not stupid, really. I'm sure he'll want me to do something I shouldn't.

But if he wants something from me, I certainly want something from him. If the price tag on talking to him is getting more information, maybe even enough to pierce the screen he puts up and actually understand him, I can endure.

I can always tell him no or yell for the guards.

Publishing on him, really publishing something accurate on him, would make my reputation for the rest of my life, getting me out of this shithole and giving me enough money to live where the addicts don't. A whole fucking night without having to listen to gunfire, or my neighbors having a screaming fight, or the whop-whop of a helicopter, or being late to work because the SWAT team has confined me to my shit apartment while they serve a warrant—god, there isn't much I wouldn't give to sleep without a knife under my pillow.

I cannot imagine what it's like not to be afraid of opening the mail because you know bills are coming, or of counting every single penny before I go to the grocery store. I cannot imagine what it's like not to skip meals.

I would give anything, anything at all to be able to defend myself from the guard on floor three without losing my job.

A good publication on him would make me a respected face in the field. Even if everything I'm doing here is useless, the chance that I could make something out of myself is worth taking. I don't even care, at this point, if I do pick a fight with some of the big names in psychiatry. Even fights in academia can advance your career.

Anything. Just get me out of here.

But the real stunner is that he apologized to me. He never, ever apologizes. He's practically famous for it. They managed to catch him once and put him on trial for a bombing that left fifty people dead and dying. The families confronted him, crying and telling pitiful stories about their loved ones, and he simply watched them like they were an act at the theater. He even applauded after one woman broke down into helpless sobs while trying to talk about her daughter, and told her that her pathos was really quite well done. They had to tackle her, and he just watched and kept clapping, whistling his approval and appreciation.

He apologized to me for pushing me, and he told me that I could understand him.

I know he's frustrated with how stupid people can be. I know he gets bored. I know that he feels like he's surrounded by idiots, and sometimes I feel like an idiot when he talks—if he'd been academically inclined, he'd be in a top secret facility somewhere—and I know that he never, ever tells anyone he thinks they're smart. Even Nigma, from the conversations we've been able to catch, has never been told he's intelligent.

And Nigma is, to put it lightly, terrifyingly brilliant. Even if he doesn't believe anyone notices, writing those riddles for him required me to spend hours reading literature and history. I've spent more time reading for my weekly sessions with Nigma than I did for my PhD.

Why would he do these things? I'm nobody special. I'm not even particularly well liked. Whatever influence he might get from charming me would be ridiculously small. It's not worth manipulating me.

I wish I knew if he was sincere.

I… I wish he was sincere, and it scares me.

I wish he'd be honest with me, but if I keep observing him, maybe there will be a pattern that'll give me a little insight into the way he thinks.


	6. Chapter 6

Just a little push on Nigma gave him to me—all I had to do was mention that he's the only person I can really talk to in sufficiently scornful tones, and listen to the stuttering rant it evoked in him.

That is one _massive_ inferiority complex, which makes him a tool. Pun intended.

A fun fact for all the little kiddos out there: if you're going to con someone into thinking they're special to you, you need to apply pressure with a needle, not a baseball bat. Well, unless they're particularly oblivious to the thing you're using to apply pressure. I've met people who were incredibly oblivious to the idea anyone might want to fuck them, and in their case, flattery has to be applied with a mallet.

They occasionally give me a little internet time here, which I spend scanning the world: anywhere, everywhere, news, and discussions. I ran into a fella discussing how to make a woman love him by rescuing her. It works if you're sufficiently subtle and they want to believe you, in the same way that guy named Pavlov conditioned his dog. The man writing the discussion failed, since he was applying pressure with a bat and had the self-control of an incontinent spaniel, but the basic technique is sound.

Nigma was already interested in her, thanks to her little trick with the riddles. All I had to do was suggest that she's lonely. I actually referred to her as "that cat lady we both see." It was easy for him to connect the dots between cat lady and lonely because he genuinely thinks everyone else is a "mental midget"—Nigma believes he is a lone genius in a sea of stupidity, and that his genius is why he's so isolated.

The truth is that he vacillates between insufferably catty and begging, when he's not behind a screen. No one is going to volunteer to listen to that, so he stays lonely and congratulates himself on it like his inability to get along with anyone is a virtue. When I called her a cat lady, he immediately re-classified her just enough to make her a potential target for romance.

You see, Nigma thinks he's smart, and if she can exchange riddles with him, she must be smart. If she's smart, she must be as lonely as he is. And of course, since she wrote the riddles, he can uniquely appreciate her. And of course, because she's smart, she'll automatically be attracted to him as well.

I have exactly zero worry that he'll be successful. He ain't a subtle man, our Nigma, despite being smart. I've watched him, too. If he doesn't like someone, he's really clear about it: sneering, cutting comments, insults. If he wasn't such a good hacker, someone would have shivved him years ago. Unfortunately, he's too useful to too many important people, so he's insulated from the kind of fatal lesson he appears to need.

I'm guessing Nigma isn't subtle when he likes someone, either. He's going to do his clumsy best to try to convince her he can appreciate her, chances are good by complimenting her appearance, and when she shoots him down, he's going to lose his shit all over the place.

This is going to scare her and prevent her from making any sort of bond with him—I don't think she would, but it's good to ensure that I don't have any competitors.

And like any scared person, she's going to want reassurance.

I'm not stupid enough to make a move on her then. The only thing I'm going to do is talk, just a little bit, about how sad it is to see someone I can actually talk to be stuck in this kind of job. I might even throw in a hint of outrage, quickly stifled, that Nigma is depriving me of my toy. Of course, I am in no way stupid enough to say toy to her yet, but if the mood fits…

It'll get me a few things: first, I'm just reinforcing the idea that I think she's smart, in a way that makes it seem like a backhanded compliment. After all, I am a psychopath and we're a selfish group—it'll make sense to her that her value to me lies in my desire to talk to someone. That much isn't exactly a lie.

Repetition, as the ancient Greek rhetoricians could tell you, is the secret to establishing truth. I'll keep repeating variations on the idea that she's smart and I enjoy talking to her, and she'll eventually take it as truth.

She wants to believe I have some twisted, stunted version of interest in her, and I intend to give her little drabbles here and there that indicate it. It's just delicious that I'm using the truth for this, even though what I mean and what she hears are drastically different.

I haven't lied to her yet. When she realizes she's lied to herself, despite the fact that she knows better, it's going to shatter her like an expensive vase. I may jizz on the spot, from watching it.

Second, I want her to keep feeling alienated from her job. I had to give her hope last time for a good career so she'd keep coming around, but I need her to feel like she doesn't have a future here. And that is exactly true. She doesn't.

I'm going to make sure she doesn't.

All of this, together, is going to add up to her trying to figure out what I want from her, vacillating between some sort of sexual interest—hey, I've been probing her with innuendo and she's not stupid—and a coming request for her to do something illegal, because she knows I'm not stupid. She'll probably assume I want her to carry a message, or to do me a favor to ease my stay here. And because she thinks the stakes are that low, she'll tell herself that she can just turn me down, or call the guards, or somehow assert her authority over me as a doctor.

Ain't it fantastic when they do some of the work for you? I do want something from her, but it's a whole lot more than she thinks it is. The penny-ante poker she thinks we're playing is going to cost her this whole life.

I'll keep all this nonsense up, including inciting guards and other inmates to give her shit in my subtle way, until I see her finally lose her temper. She needs to have a good, solid sustained period of rage at Arkham and the job she's doing in order to be receptive to the idea that she should leave it, and to be convinced I give a shit to leave it with me. The question is how much pressure and how long I'll have to apply it. I've picked up a bit of masochism from her, so I'm going to apply it like a straight razor. She expects the world to stomp on her dreams, and it's going to.

By contrast and design, I am going to start looking really reasonable. I'm taking this one with me, even if I have to drag her out by force.

* * *

Today was… I didn't mean to freeze when Nigma hit on me, but honestly, he is the last person I'd expect to do it. Nigma doesn't really play those kinds of games. In fact, we weren't even sure sexual attraction was a part of his psyche in the direct sense. My predecessors with him seem to think that his need to prove his intellectual superiority is a form of sexual sublimation, but I didn't agree until today. He actually posed me a riddle: what does every man want most, but cannot give himself?

My first thought was that this was yet another of his attempts to assert his superior intelligence. I've been able to tease some answers out of him about his family and his motivations by shocking him, but any time he talks he bounces back to the same attempt to remind me that he's smarter than I am.

So I answered proof of superiority. That appears to be what he wants most out of the world.

Nigma chuckled, when I said it and leaned over the table between us to put his hand on mine. Nigma is a bit weird as those things go, because as far as we can tell he usually works by himself. He'll bribe or blackmail someone into a task on occasion, but we figured he was touch and/or relationship aversive, simply because we never really see him bonding with anyone. He likes to lurk on the sidelines, sniping at people he hates and undermining them.

I have never seen him touch anyone. Not even by accident.

I froze, and he looked me in the eyes and told me the answer was appreciation, then squeezed my hand.

It's not unusual for a patient to form an attachment or even imagine that they love their therapist. Nigma and I have just not had the kind of conversations that would lead to transference, so I sat there frozen trying to figure out where the relationship had become personal for him. I'm pretty sure it was my expression that touched off the violent fit—he's touchy, and I'm usually careful to seem very eager to talk to him and give him as much evidence as possible that I think he's interesting.

But I was frozen, and I'm pretty sure I was frowning, and Nigma took that as disgust.

He stood up, picked up his chair, and started to beat it against the wall. I have no idea if he was breaking it to make a club, or if he was just taking it out on the chair, but the guards ran in and I put the table between us. I'm not going to repeat some of the things Nigma said about me. The nicest thing in that rant was calling me a cat lady. The rest of it was… I'm starting to wonder if maybe his mother is a part of the problem for him. I know, just from dating a programmer for awhile as an undergrad, that the kind of hardcore hacking he does requires patience and is intensely frustrating. I also know that he's not allowed any computer time because he's too good with systems, so maybe that rage came from those two things as well?

I have trouble believing Nigma is actually attracted to me in any substantive way. Maybe he assumed the riddles were an attempt on my part to express interest?

I'm going to get transferred off his care rotation as soon as possible.

The next session that day was with the man who calls himself the Joker. He's been equally weird recently. He was constantly probing to see what made me flinch, and now, for whatever reason, the innuendo and the arch comments have mostly stopped. I was a bit sweaty and shaken when they shuffled him in the room for the session, and Nigma was still screaming in the hall while they dragged him down it. The Joker didn't needle me about it. He didn't give me a hard time. He didn't even make any comments about the fact that I was sweaty and rumpled from jumping backward.

He just sat down, looking at the door, then he turned to me and said that he doesn't envy me my job.

I know he doesn't have compassion in the regular sense, and I'm not stupid enough to think that suddenly all my patients have developed a fixation with me. He certainly didn't do anything so emotional as ask me how I was doing. Instead, he looked me up and down and then glared, for a moment down the hall, as if he were contemplating doing something to Nigma. Then the anger faded and he looked at me again and made a flip little comment about needing my attention during our sessions, with this weird hint of a growl in it.

Everything after that was… I think forced is a good way to put it. He was surly, but without the same malicious teasing. Instead, he was just angry. And then he actually stood up before we were scheduled to end and asked to leave.

Right before he left, he looked me up and down again and for just a second, if I didn't know better, I'd say he looked … soft.

I actually told my supervisor I was sick and left right after that.

Is it possible that he actually cares? I'm sure it's just a matter of being angry that he doesn't get to have the conversations we were having—I know he's bored and he's given every sign of actually enjoying the conversation, despite his general irritation with the world at large. Even his subtle body language tells me he's interested in the conversation. Nobody watches the other person that closely without being interested in something about them.

This behavior is not at all like him. We don't have anything like it on the hundreds of hours of footage we have on him. We don't even have any evidence he can get close to anyone. We know he is, on some level, able to express sexual desire. The footage of him masturbating and calling out male names is particularly disturbing—he starts baby-talking at one point and talking about his "daddy"—but it dates from the idiot who wrote the paper about his latent homosexual urges, so I'm guessing that it was part of the act.

Is it possible for him to have transference? Our conversations have been very personal, but I usually spend more time talking than he does. He seems to want to be bribed to talk, trading a certain amount of discussion about the news or something else before he'll talk about anything personal. And he spends a lot of time… quizzing me, I suppose. He spends a lot of time asking me what I think this or that thing he'd done means, then listening like it's important that I get it.

What if he does have a mild case of transference?

He's pretty dangerous. If he does and he decides I've hurt his feelings, he'll get even. I doubt very much it will be with a cream pie.

But he may tell me more about himself. If he has transference, it might motivate him to be more honest.

That's really manipulative of me. Am I really that kind of person?

Do I really want to be that kind of person?

I don't know. I just don't know any more.


	7. Chapter 7

At times like these, I have to think of myself as an artist—there are just not that many people who are this good at inspiring terror and twisting little heads around. She looked a little ratty before. Now she looks like a walking corpse. If she's getting four hours of sleep a night, I'll feed someone to Croc. That shaky dog thing she had going on before is back, and she jumps when the guards come into the room.

The really interesting thing is that she doesn't jump when she's in there with me. In fact, if I had to guess, this is where she feels the safest. That is, by far, the funniest thing I've seen in a very long time. It's probably because of the way the guards act when I'm around, but I'll use it.

That's right. Learn to let your guard down around me. I'm safe.

Until I'm not.

The idiot guard on the third floor with the afterschool special fixation has an equally strong fascination with eye-wateringly saccharine romance. I've been staring at her handwriting for months now. It wasn't that hard to forge a love note, and the poor sap immediately started pestering her. I started a rumor that she was sleeping with one of the inmates—she will be, of course, and it will be with me—and her boss is reviewing her records. They very nearly pulled her off rotations entirely, but I told them that if I didn't get to see her, I'd be displeased. They have the tapes, so they know I'm not fucking her.

This also made the guards disrespectful as hell, and I'm told one of them actually cornered her and groped her. I'll find him later, as part of proving how much I care about her. She's my toy, and while I may put a protective face on it to make her feel safer, the truth is that I don't fucking share if I don't want to.

That fucker touched my toy, and he will pay for it.

The prisoners are equally… well, let's call it excited to see her. One of those crazy motherfuckers actually masturbated at her. He didn't touch her, however, so he'll get a pass.

As for me? Anger at all the appropriate times, quickly hidden and then less quickly, and then finally, grudgingly, I asked her what was going on and told her about the rumors on the ward.

That's the first time I actually heard her scream. Goes right through the ear, that does—high-pitched as hell. I'm surprised dogs weren't barking. The guards came in when she started screaming, then she jumped again and started crying and told them to get out.

I let her go on for awhile. She needs to feel as vulnerable as possible, and over-sharing with your patient will do that. Before she could quite figure out that she was over-sharing, I played my hand a little by reaching for hers, then drawing back. Just the tiniest bit, and sensitive as she is, she felt it like I'd slapped her.

That doe-eyed thing she does is one of my favorite expressions. Big eyes, shallow breath, mouth open slightly, fingers flexed and then open as she turned her hand up on the table.

Then, and only then, did I look her in the eye and do my version of an interested face—mouth slightly open, eyes drifting down at her hand like I long to touch it but can't, leaning forward ever so slightly, face softening.

And she ate it up, flushing from head to toe and leaving her hand there, open, between us. I put mine near hers, close enough to feel the body heat, and let her close that last millimeter, fingertips brushing mine.

I told her they didn't deserve her, and they don't, but she heard romance in it. I told her that she didn't deserve to have to put up with it, so low it was just on this side of a whisper. The footage will show our hands barely touching, more than enough to get her shit-canned, but I want her to think she can hide it for now. The tone is also intimate, and from the thing she did after I said it—turning her head up to expose her neck—she's been having some seriously naughty me-themed thoughts.

Wait until she gets to know mine.

I'll let her start the dirty talk, though, for the illusion of control. With any luck, she'll think she has control right up until we both get out of here.

* * *

I hate this job. I hate this fucking job.

I know I can't afford to leave it, that in this economy I should just be grateful that I can pay the bills, but I hate this job. It isn't just that I'm not sure there's a point to what we do. I can't sleep anymore because of this stupid fucking job. I end up staying up all night watching the news, watching police violence, protests, news stories about crime, and a million other things that depress the hell out of me. I shouldn't, but I just keep hearing him tell me that the people who benefit from the system will do anything to keep it the way it is, even though it means students getting beaten and pepper-sprayed, tent cities for the homeless in the abandoned utility and sewer tunnels, and kids who've never had a home over their heads and end up with diseases of malnutrition from the 19th century.

It's right there, right there in the news next to stories about Wayne Enterprises and record stock performances. The news announcer can go right from stories about the bodies of a family found drowned in the sewer tunnel they'd been living in, to footage of the fashion worn to the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit on conspicuous consumption. Footage of six body bags being wheeled out of the sewer tunnel and a forty thousand dollar dress in a few seconds. The announcer's voice never stops being perky.

Just another day here in Gotham.

I sit there and watch it all.

The footage of students is consistently overlaid with fat assholes in suits talking about youth these days, and saying that the economy is great, and if students really wanted jobs, they could get them.

How can they not see the desperation in the students' faces? These aren't people who sit around doing nothing, they're fucking terrified and the whole damn world has let them down.

I got through college by thinking I could just keep going, just keep overcoming barriers and eventually someone would have to acknowledge me. They'd have to see that I was a hard worker, and that it would eventually lead to success. I kept counting on there being a future that I could just get to if I worked hard enough, that I'd be able to help my parents retire, or at least pay off some of their bills.

And then I think about my family. I think about growing up wearing the same clothes for years, long past when they fit. I think about being so goddamn excited to get a new pair of jeans, about the shit the other kids used to tell me about being poor and the looks on their faces when I had to go get the free lunch, about all the white collar fuckers who thought it would be okay to grope me. I think about wanting, more than anything else, a store-bought birthday cake, with that beautiful white icing, but we could never afford it.

I know it seems petty, but a real cake and a pair of jeans that actually fit were symbols for all the things I couldn't have, for all the years spent watching my parents fight over money, helpless to do a damn thing but listen to them screaming at each other. It just felt like if I could have the cake and clothes that actually fit me, it would mean things were okay. If the little shit was okay, it would mean the big things were are handled.

My family won't even talk to me anymore.

When I got into college, they drifted away, because what in the world would we have to say to each other—I'm just another one of those rich bastards, a "dahk-tah." The funny part is that the white collar people don't want me either. I don't have the right accent, and I didn't go to the right schools. I was constantly worried about money. I never went anywhere for Spring break, just stayed in the library and studied.

This is what all that study got me. Some of my classmates, the ones from good families, have excellent careers. They barely passed the classes I was in with them, and now they're top flight surgeons, or hospital administrators.

And I'm here. Just here, going nowhere. I worked my ass off to get here, and I'm never going to go anywhere except this shit, dead-end job. I may not even have the job by the end of the month, depending on how the HR office decides on the accusation that I'm sleeping with one of the inmates.

I don't know what the hell happened at work. It's like every single thing that could have gone wrong happened at the same time, from that guard with the forged love note to the rumor I've been having sex with one of the inmates.

The really funny thing is that the only inmate I'd like be interested in doing anything with has been the soul of courtesy. It's been weird to watch him slowly becoming more open about how he feels.

And the last session… I know we're not supposed to touch, but just the tips of our fingers? The guards that chain him up touch him more than that.

Maybe he's just flattering me, but it was so good to hear someone notice me. The more I do what I'm supposed to do, the more shit I seem to take and the worse my life gets. I'm so tired of it. I'm so tired of trying to do what I'm supposed to do and getting nowhere.

I think he might actually be honest. He seems to be struggling with it—the single most manipulative, self-consciously intelligent person I know appears to be struggling with… it's too much to call it love, but maybe some sort of soft feeling.

Maybe he's been lonely. I know he never has anyone to talk to.

I don't, either.


	8. Chapter 8

I'm going to jump the gun slightly and tell her I've been thinking about her. No more, no less. She wouldn't believe me if I said anything stronger, and why put any more energy into this than I have to?

How do I know she'll believe it? All those me-themed dirty dreams and the mounting frustration—people have the most amusing tendency to think that if they're having thoughts about you, you must be having thoughts about them, and I've encouraged her as much as I could without being too obvious.

If I were the confessing type, I'd be willing to bet publically that she'll fuck me like a goddamn demon when we get around to it, which is good, because I'm planning on quite literally fucking her into a puddle. She's going to do things she's never done before, and she's going to like all of them.

It really was an instructive year, that year I spent talking to pimps. Those discussions about women—your average pimp knows about the way women are taught to react to certain kinds of men, and they tend to look for women who've been significantly hurt. What they don't seem to understand is that the picture isn't as simple as those tendencies being in the "nature" of women and men, or that the response of women to a certain kind of confidence is fully as conditioned as teaching your dog where to piss. Of course, the responses of men to the same kind of confidence are equally conditioned.

Little or big, women are just as capable of fucking you up as your average man, and just as likely to react in particular ways when you pull their chain. Those pimps constantly talked about the nature of women and men, about the natural role of men as powerful and women as submissive. People who think that way are fucking fools, reassuring themselves that they deserve a power they couldn't earn on their own.

Hell, a surprising number of the pimps I spent time with couldn't even figure out how they were manipulating people. They just copied someone else, right down to their stupid mistakes. The pimps who could manipulate on purpose usually didn't spout that shit. They didn't need to.

All my observation led me to a single, undeniable fact: if you can find the conditioning, you can change it. Human minds are malleable as fuck, whether simply through the "monkey see, monkey mirror" effect or through simple isolation. Pimps justify themselves, when they bother, by claiming that women are weak, or that they're simply unable to control themselves and need to be guided.

Kids, you can give anyone a moment of uncontrollable pleasure if you bother to learn how to do it and pay the fuck attention to what you're doing. I can tell you for a fact you don't have to be pretty to do it.

Once they've learned you can dispense it, they will come back for it like a junkie comes back to their dealer. They can't help it. It's this odd reflex, something the body learns that appears to go right past the brain.

If you're sufficiently ruthless, you can isolate them and slowly change their minds. The really advanced manipulator can change their mind without physically isolating them—all I have to do is kick the right preconceptions at the right time and the whole house of idiocy comes crashing down around their ears.

And then I can build back up on the empty spot.

We're nearing that critical point where I start to make requests. Before we do that, I need to be sure I have more leverage than her soft feelings and general disaffection with society. I need a patsy for that, and I need a little bit of blackmail on her. She needs the patsy because she needs to know that someone specific is out to get her, someone she can focus her rage on. The blackmail is for the slow, lovely process of boiling her like a frog.

The good news that I got more than enough blackmail after she broke down last time. Not only is it inappropriate that she talked to me about herself—gotta love professional ethics—but she let slip that she's sexually frustrated in that rant. Now, I knew that before she blew her lid based on how goddamn touchy she is and all that body language, but it's on camera now. Even the morons she has for bosses can't miss it now. Guilt and that little slip just need to be properly shaped and it'll be sufficient for most of what I need. She needs to feel guilty about the slip, and since she thinks I care, she's going to feel like she took advantage of me.

After all, poor little old me, I'm all chained up and lonely.

And vulnerable. Oh yes, ever so vulnerable. I finally opened up to someone after all this time, and that person is threatening to run. My little rabbit is going to want to run when she figures out what she 'fessed up to and while her job crumbles around her ears, but where can she go?

Good thing the big bad wolf has a soft spot for bunnies.

Never underestimate the value of building a reputation for inconsistent terror—intermittent reinforcement. And for that matter, never underestimate the degree to which women are conditioned to think they can reform a man.

There's also the issue of patient-doctor relationships. It can be so hard to open up for people like me. My goodness, if she leaves I may never open up again.

She knows how hard trust is for me. Well, I should say that she knows it's hard. She doesn't know it's impossible. I trust no man or woman. Paranoia is the only rational response to paying attention to the world around you.

I'm blaming the ex on staff for her recent streak of bad luck—that particular piece of information was another of those marvelous chances lining up, a conversation I overheard on the way to the lunchroom. She is the hottest topic for gossip right now, a combination of sex scandal and fall from grace that never stops being popular.

I genuinely thought she was here to make her name. Turns out, she was just that hard up for a job, and one of her exes works here.

I've met him. She was definitely fishing in the shallow end with that one. He may have an MD, but he is every bit as dull and boring as any of the other MDs they've sent in to me over the years—old before his time, routine-bound, able to memorize facts but doesn't understand what they mean. His highest aspiration is probably to live in the suburbs and fuck once a week. I have trouble picturing that man in bed, for that matter. He probably bored her to sleep every night.

She won't believe he's sexually jealous. I doubt he has the imagination to be jealous. He is, however, painfully worried about his reputation and hers. He's been one of the loudest voices to have her fired over the rumor I started, for fear of the shit splattering on to him because he recommended her.

Poor little bunny, if only I were the compassionate type. But the shit is about to get deeper.

As for the task, it's usually best to start with something small. Most people won't plunge head-first into crime. They're too afraid of what it means, and she's been trying to be a good girl for too long to take the plunge in one step.

So the thing I'll be asking her to do is quite small and leaves no evidence—I'm going to ask for information about the ex. What I'm planning on doing with it, however, will be big, bloody, and messy.

I won't say I'm the jealous type, but he ought to be punished for thinking they're in the same league. I'll be improving the world and sending a little message with the same action.

The best blackmail leaves the victim with some hope that they can keep it covered up by complying, subtle enough to be covered and devastating enough to be worth covering up. My lovely bunny will, with that information, be a party to a homicide that I am never going to admit directly.

Uncertainty, kids, is the raw stuff of manipulation.

Penguin owes me a favor. Having this stuffed shirt offed won't even strike him as being significant, and my reputation for being random should keep him from thinking this is anything more than an expression of my annoyance at Arkham staff.

* * *

Our last session was odd. Well, more odd than normal. He smiled at me when they escorted him in—this little, tentative smile that actually looked genuine. Not cruel, not unhappy, simply as if he were glad to see me. It disappeared really quickly and he looked away. When he looked back, he had the bored face he usually gets.

He mentioned that one of the other doctors has been talking fairly loudly about getting me fired, and asked me about the guy—it was my ex! Why would my ex be so desperate to get me fired? We didn't end things that badly. We didn't fight. I didn't do anything to the man. He was curious about my ex—he says my ex said a few things in front of the inmates that made it sound like he could have been the source of that rumor. Something about regretting his decision to recommend me, and the difficulty in firing people.

I don't think I've been that angry in a long time, not since my… outburst. I feel incredibly guilty about it. It's not his fault that the staff and inmates have been reacting badly to that rumor. I shouldn't have gone off on him like that.

For a psychopath, he's been very understanding. Well, understanding in his own way. It's not like he's asking how I feel, he's just there, listening. Sometimes he asks a question, other times he just sits there and lets me fill in the silence. We talk about him sometimes—just in the sense of politics or news, he's very closemouthed about his past—but mostly we just talk. It's pretty clear to me that he is lonely, even though as far as we can tell, he's not very social.

He wanted to know what kind of person my ex was. He didn't ask anything to personal, just a few questions about my ex's habits. It's not like the information was vital, so I told him. I ended up telling a story about his favorite restaurant, this really awful Chinese place on 3rd and Stanton. I like Chinese food, but that place makes the greasiest, saltiest versions of it. When we were students together, it made sense to eat there—the food was really cheap-but my ex still likes it and eats there, even though he could afford much better food.

We talked for a little while after that about what makes good Chinese food, and he confessed that he's a little picky about what good food should taste like. We ended up talking about cooking until they came to get him. Just before they came in, he mentioned, almost muttering, that he'd been thinking about me.

I… I don't know what to think. Between the smile and that, I'm really starting to think he likes me. Maybe it's just because they usually send self-satisfied, arrogant old men in to talk to him. Or maybe because he likes to get the chance to just talk to someone without being so obviously measured. I know they usually extensively test and interrogate him. That has to get frustrating. The inmate population is pretty violent here, too, so this is probably the only chance he gets to talk without having to worry about violence.

And then there was the hand touch. We really don't know anything about his romantic partners. We don't know if he has any, or what gender they are, or how he treats them, or how long he's around them. He lies far too much for anyone to take his word for it, and he's never seen with anyone in particular. Psychopaths usually can't sustain long-term relationships, and maybe that's why we don't know, but the hand touch and that little smile are not really characteristic of the way we think he behaves.

Psychopaths are not romantic. They aren't able to sustain the kind of emotional closeness or complexity he's displaying. Even the ones that masquerade as more normal to attract partners can't do this kind of sustained display of slowly growing feelings. To the best of our knowledge, they're impatient to the point of self-sabotage, and have no ability to consider or be considerate of anyone else's feelings.

I said I thought he might be a whole new category of personality disorder. Is it possible that he maintains a sort of public persona, and that the private persona is less fractured, or angry?

Does the Joker have, on some fundamental level, the ability to experience even a twisted version of love or empathy?

This could have huge ramifications for the way we understand psychopathy.

If I'm being honest, totally honest with myself, I want to stick around to see that smile again. It was so sweet, and he's been so nice. Not, you know, nice like a date. Nice like someone who is trying hard to be liked, but who feels a little torn about that urge.

If he wasn't torn, I would know he was lying. This kind of unsure searching is completely alien to what he know about him and, frankly, it's consistent with someone experiencing emotions they don't normally have.

Surely it isn't me. I'm nothing special. It's probably just the timing, or some other force in his life, but it's so fortuitous.

I have to take advantage of this. I have to.

But I can't even pretend that I'm approaching this as a disinterested party, or even as a good scientist.

My dreams haven't stopped. If anything, that millimeter of contact between our hands has sent my unconscious mind into creative overdrive. I didn't even know I was capable of having the kind of dreams I'm having about him. I don't even watch porn very often, let alone spend this much time thinking about things I have to assume are coming straight from some untapped reservoir of creative filth in my head. I barely enjoyed having sex with my ex, and while I get the urge like anyone else would, it's not usually this … complicated?

Maybe it's just the stress. This must all be sublimation from my job stress, and worrying about money, and it's been while.

Okay, it's been a long while, but I'm not really comfortable using a dating service and picking someone up at a bar seems so careless. I'm not comfortable just relying on condoms for safety, but I miss someone else being there.

Masturbation is fun, it's not quite the same.

I know I can't do anything with him. I know he could not be a more inappropriate focus for those urges, but there's something oddly sweet in the contrast between those little shy touches and the presence he has when he's trying to be controlling. And he's so very charismatic when he wants to be.

I shouldn't judge myself for it. They're just fantasies. It's not like I'm ever going to do anything about it.


	9. Chapter 9

Everyone in this city has a favorite restaurant, so it was a safe enough question. And from it, I got his habits and where to find him. From his working hours, I got when he could be found. A quick conversation later with one of the Penguin's little helpers, due to be paroled, and the next time her ex visited the restaurant, it was held up by an amateur who "accidentally" emptied a clip into him after collecting the money from the till.

I specifically ordered him to empty the clip into the fucker. Nothing sends a message like overkill, and the amateur quite literally left bits of her insipid ex all over the restaurant.

I'm told they found a chunk of brain in the till. Some crime scene technician is having nightmares tonight, I can guarantee that. If Zsasz wasn't still in here, I'd have used him specifically to make sure the techs puked while they catalog the scene. Zsasz does a number on crime scene techs—he doesn't count them among his official victims, but he does enjoy the fact that they can barely testify. It's one of the few things we have in common, even though I hate to say I share anything with that sloppy fuck.

However, traumatizing crime scene techs is both pleasant and tactically useful.

A disturbed tech is a sloppy one, and chaos knows watching them try to testify makes the ridiculous farce of justice easier to sit through. Pale, sweaty, twitchy techs are hilarious.

I'd been looking forward to our next session all week and she did not disappoint. I could tell instantly that she knew. I was fucking hard from the time I sat down until I left. She couldn't make eye contact, except for fleeting, haunted glances that made her face pale.

But her body? Oh, her body said a few other things entirely. Every suggestive gesture she's been making—the leaning, the mouth open, the faint flush—every single one of them was exaggerated until they were nearly cartoonish. She whipsawed back and forth in her chair like I was giving her a jolt of current, an hour of writhing and twitching that was better than porn.

I thought she was a masochist before. Now I know she is. She can't stop herself from reacting to me, even though her head must be a screaming mass of guilt and fear. The whole thing is a big messy cocktail that she can't stop drinking. I can't blame her. I'm having trouble keeping my hands off her, myself.

If her fantasies haven't started including violence, they will soon. Her body keeps reacting no matter what her head is telling her, and the fact that she feels guilty about that while she keeps reacting is just going to keep dragging her down. Too guilty to stop, too turned on to leave, and too guilty about being turned on to do anything but punish herself for it.

Talking to me is, for her, punishing herself. I've worked damn hard to ensure that particular fixation over the last few months. I am her punishment and her relief, her blackmailer, and her punisher.

Even before I teach her to sit up and beg, I can just about promise I'm her libido, as well.

I certainly will be.

She can't do a goddamn thing about any of this, either. The trap is elegant and a product of every little bit of this drab institutional scenery. The tools at hand work just as well against her as they might against me, and better against her.

After all, I know they're out to get me.

She can't acknowledge the death of her ex. She can't ask if I had anything to do with it—we're on camera. Every single bit of this is being recorded. It wouldn't take much effort for a prosecutor to turn this into a story about a psychiatrist using a criminal to get even with her ex. I find the state prosecutor to be as sharp as a pile of pillows, but even he couldn't miss that cue.

She is culpable for her ex's death no matter what she says or doesn't say. After all, she did tell me where to find him. It's a big city. I could have found him either way, but your average jury underestimates the size and pervasiveness of my particular group of associates. They'll assume I'd never have found him without her.

As a trained professional, she should have known better. This, along with my reputation, her over-sharing, and the touching, won't make her sympathetic to a jury. In fact, I'd say she couldn't find a sympathetic jury anywhere. Even if they tried her outside Gotham, footage of even one of my little object lessons for society and a reading of the novel they keep on my actions will sink her faster than humping me on the stand.

The best part of this, however, is in her head. If she knows for sure that I did order this, it destroys her ability to think of herself as a professional or even a good person. I'll be destroying that no matter what, but the idea needs to fester in her mind. It needs to rot away in there until she knows she can't think of herself as a good person any more.

People will cling to that particular idea as hard as they can, long past anyone with a shred of sense would let go of it.

Along with the attraction that bounces her around in her chair, she's well on her way to becoming one of us. It's a real pity she went for compliance first growing up—I'm going to have to work her through guilt and into deciding that thinking of herself as good or evil is intolerable, which won't be easy. Being bad has to be intolerable to her. She has to be desperate for a way to escape feeling guilty, and I intend to break her fingers until she lets go.

There is no guilt, because there is no good or evil. There are only people with the will to do what they want and everybody else, cowering behind their institutions, laziness, and the complete inability to focus their efforts. Nietzsche almost had it, but he kept falling back into the trap of imagining ways to improve the breed while he imagined his supermen.

If I could have met the man, I would have told him the flat truth. There is no improvement. You either have it or you don't. If you have it, you'll do what you need to. If you don't, you deserve to be punished for being a lazy sack of shit and for all the millions of ways you punish anyone who does have it.

The joke here is that what makes a "superman" is being able to think outside social conventions, not whatever keeps that caped alien in the air. He's not a superman, and no matter how hard he tries, no one is going to forget that he's an alien. Being a superman means nothing less and nothing more than being the unexpected. Not good. Not evil. Just unfettered.

It'd be easier if she came to that conclusion without having to drag herself sideways through guilt, but not everyone is as lucky as I am. I happen to know that good and evil is a silly little sideshow attraction, but I'm aware how many people seem to want to stop there.

The real show is happening somewhere else.

I find this part particularly funny—she can't report herself, because she's over-shared so much and so often that she will instantly lose her license to practice, causing her to default on her loans and lose everything she's worked so hard to get, all those little social signs of being good. If the criminal charges don't motivate her, I know the economic losses will.

The knee-slapper is that even though she likes to think of herself as a good person, she's too selfish to report herself. One of the funniest things about good people is that they are almost always too selfish to qualify for "good" in any sense but passively. They may not actively do bad things, but they certainly won't do good things if good things mean losing what they have. Really, this little gem of an observation had a great deal to do with my early realization that good and evil mean precisely nothing aside from the degree to which people comply with what they're expected to do.

Good, of course, means compliance.

My little darling has repeatedly demonstrated that she's too selfish to come over all self-sacrificing and give it all up to appease her guilt. I've been testing her guilt and the limits of her self-interest the entire time, and I'm glad to say that every time she could have backed away, she's chosen not to just in case she manages to gain from staying.

Honest selfishness is, quite frankly, the greatest good most people are capable of. If I believed in a cure, I'd say she was getting better from the sickness that is society. But she won't be fully better until she understands that she was selfish and why she chose what she did, until she understands how and why she is culpable, and until she understands that there is no culpability.

There is nothing but what we chose to do and the great mass of decisions that affect the world.

In the mean time, watching her see-saw through guilt and fear is intoxicating. I'm saving all of it, the energy, the high, the blood pooling in my cock, for when I get her out of this fishbowl.

I'm going to rip through her like a chainsaw, high as fuck and twice as merciless.

I've never understood why people need drugs when they could have this.

* * *

I know this is a dissociative episode. I've never had one before, but I recognize the symptoms. There's a thick fog, a blanket between me and everything except him. The whole day in a fog, voices faint and distant, my own voice echoing like a whisper in a canyon, rasping and sibilant, bouncing off the walls.

Some strange, rational part of me keeps naming my emotional states like a computer, keeping a running tally. It's tallying the jail time I'm going to have to serve, it's tallying the way prisoners and guards now avoid me. I have a halo. They were aggressive, rude. Now no one will get anywhere near me physically, and they'll barely talk to me. Some of them won't even look at me anymore.

I don't want to think about why, but that same rational part of me keeps spitting out his name.

My mouth runs through all the right words, all the polite little formulas we use to get along, and that part of my brain keeps coming back to his name, to my voice telling him about that Chinese restaurant. I have no idea why I told him. I know he's dangerous. Why did I tell him? What have I been doing?

I don't remember dressing this morning. It can't be that bad. No one is staring at my clothes.

Why am I thinking about my clothes?

I don't know why I showed up for our session.

Routines. Why am I bothering with routines?

It has to be him. It has to be something he ordered. The timing is too convenient, and the way my ex was killed was too personal. And the guards. And the inmates. They all know.

I don't understand why he would do this. He's not dumb. He's not jealous, and I don't think it's even possible for him to be attached enough to be jealous. We don't have a relationship. I'm just his psychiatrist. I'm nobody. I don't have money. I don't have anything.

I cannot believe I thought he might be capable of empathy.

The whole asylum is treating me like I'm his property. No one will talk to me now. Nothing. They just watch me, silent, like a pack of dogs. I could barely make myself open the door, and when I walked in, I collapsed into the chair. I know he saw it. I know this is being recorded, and it's as good as a confession, that kind of strong emotional response on seeing him.

I'm fucked. I'm so fucked.

I made myself look at his face. I had to… I had to see.

He makes an innocent expression look like an obscenity, and underneath it—he did it.

He's amused. When he saw me look at him, he smiled. My skin crawled.

Oh my god, he did it.

I helped him do it.

I didn't know he was going to do it.

No one is going to believe me. No one is going to give a shit if I knew. This is _the Joker_.

He is genuinely evil. How could I have ignored that he was genuinely evil? How could I possibly have thought he cared?

What the fuck was I thinking? How could I have possibly thought he was telling me the truth about anything?

I can't leave. If I try to drop him, he'll simply tell. He didn't have to say anything, I can see it on his face. He's gloating. He's fucking gloating, and he's right to do it because he fucking owns me now. What's another few years in Arkham to him? I'm surprised he hasn't escaped yet.

He fucking owns me unless I give up everything. Everything! Ten years of college. I still owe $150k and if I confess, I'll never pay it back. I'll never have a job again in the field. It'll be in the fucking newspapers all over the world—I will never live it down. I will never be anything else but the Joker's fucking fool.

We just sat there, looking at each other. His pupils dilated, opening like a fucking void in his face. There was a flush on his cheeks and he licked his lips.

Oh my god, he fucking enjoyed this. He was fucking turned on.

And I still felt it. I still felt myself flush. I felt myself react to him the way I have been, as if it made no fucking difference to me that he had my ex practically eviscerated.

My fucking nipples got hard when he smiled at me. How the fuck could my nipples have gotten hard while my skin crawled?

I didn't have anything to say to him. I finally just got up and ran out of the room.

I actually threw up as soon as I left the room. I staggered toward the hall trashcan and vomited in it. They led him right by me and he paused, watching me wretch into the fucking trashcan, on my knees in that dirty hall. I couldn't even make it to the fucking bathroom.

I could feel him enjoying it, the toes of those shitty canvas tennis shoes they give the prisoners turned toward me. I could see them under the edge of my hair, those fucking shoes. I just … no comfort. No pat. Nothing but him standing there, watching. Satisfied. Eating it up. That's all the last few months have been. He's been grooming me, and this is what he wanted.

This is what I am to him. How fucking stupid could I have been?

When the guards tried to move him, he hissed at them and stood there, watching me cower against the fucking wall, hugging the trash can. After a moment, he chuckled and let them lead him away. The guards let me sit there. No one said a fucking thing. I got up and left. I didn't know what else to do but go home and just sit there in the living room.

I still can't think of a fucking thing to do.

Jesus fucking Christ, how did I forget he was a psychopath? How the fuck could I forget he was a fucking psychopath?

Jesus, they're going to interpret me throwing up in the hall as guilt. They're going to interpret that as me expressing guilt over asking the Joker to kill my ex.

And I'm still fucking turned on. What the fuck is wrong with me?

How the fuck did this happen?


	10. Chapter 10

This is when my darling little bunny really tries to run. Alas for her, the water is already boiling and the bunny is soup. However, she can't stay soup, as delicious as it is.

A mistake the pimps I spent time with often made—they turned the heat up and left it up, as if you could somehow cook all the spine right out of a girl. Some girls, sure. Enough applied brutality, and they simply stop resisting. Of course, then you have to sweat because they will eventually snap. Women have a tendency to use poison or attack you while you sleep, and a sleepless pimp is a pimp who has no sense of proportion. He'll respond more violently, which will make her more likely to snap.

That cycle will waste a perfectly good girl and makes a mess out of the pimp.

The better pimps were confusing, not just violent. Anger yesterday is wooing today, sticky-sweet and twice as hard to get rid of, as if yesterday never existed. This makes the girl doubt herself, makes her wonder if she remembered yesterday correctly. If you never acknowledge it, she can't either, and she starts to soften again.

Would you believe that some girls will endure years of this? It's amazing how long that cycle will work, in the absence of alternatives.

My little bunny has enough spine and just enough self-consciousness to respond to all heat by acclimating. If I leave the heat on, she will talk herself into doing something stupid and drastic, wasting all our time together and my hard work. She's survived this far in a less than friendly climate. She has spine, and I can't give her an excuse to use it against me.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why she should be receiving a dozen tiger lilies around lunchtime today, at her apartment. No note. There's no need. She'll know who sent the flowers. I know to send them to her place because Arkham, cheap as it is, uses non-violent offenders to supplement office staff. Her address was not hard to find. I owed some nameless fellow a favor for it, and the cheeky little bastard chose protection.

He got it. No one will ever bother him again. I made sure of that myself—I needed the catharsis, and the last person to claim a favor got it without strings. It pays to be a little random with your underlings. Much like the girl, they'll keep hoping.

Speaking of the girl: without a doubt, my little bunny is playing hooky today. She's tried to run every time, and this is more than enough to send her skittering for the bushes. She'll be home to hear the knock on the door and answer, heart a-hammering with fear, to find a vase full of flowers sitting on her welcome mat. I intend to woo her like a man who's gone head over stupid, both because it'll confuse her and because it'll bind her to me better than glue. We're going to have to be close for me to continue my little science project.

Speaking of that, I will have to think of the next move in our little play. My little bunny-girl is very sensitive to money, so that'll have to be my tool for helping her get over good, evil, and social compliance. She's probably busy building a narrative right now to try and explain me into a box, because she probably doesn't know what else to do about the whole thing.

The box, however, is around her and not me.

With any luck, the fact that I had flowers delivered to her apartment will make her wonder if I'm having her watched. I'm not, of course. There's no need for it and my little helpers don't usually do a good job of staying hidden.

She'll come back. She has to come back.

The lilies are a pretty little reminder that she has to keep coming to see me, as well as reinforcing the idea that I'm wooing her and being proof-positive that she is involved in the untimely and amusingly messy death of her ex. A love triangle, the news might say, gone bad. Of course, this triangle only really has one side, but the subtleties will no doubt escape the goons they hire as police around here. The appearance of impropriety is sufficient to impugn her, especially after those nasty rumors and the mess made out of her ex after he apparently passed rumors about her.

I've also put about that she's mine. No subtlety about that one—she is my property, and woe betide the inmate, criminal, guard, or for that matter random stranger who lays hands on her. A bit barbaric I suppose, but it puts the finishing touch on the idea that she's been completely suborned by me. She has no reputation left to lose at Arkham, and I'm going to go about ruining her reputation in the broader world as soon as we leave.

As I said earlier, I only share my toys if I feel like it.

I'm going to be a touch disappointed if my bunny develops a drinking or drug habit before I manage to bring her home. However, Papa will forgive, just this once. I intend to be her drug of choice, but I have to be around for her to have it.

My poor bunny must be drowning in fear. Or perhaps she's drowning it.

Ha. She doesn't know fear yet.

* * *

When my alarm went off at 6 am, I sat bolt upright in bed, sweating and staring. My dreams-my ex and I sat in that restaurant. He was eating General Tso's chicken calmly, as if nothing was wrong, but he was full of holes. Everyone else at the restaurant was full of holes and they just kept eating like nothing had happened. I couldn't get them to listen to me, they just stared when I kept telling them to call the police, as if I were crazy. The Joker walked in and pushed my ex out of the booth, then sat down across from me and smiled.

I can't stop seeing him smile in my dream, exactly the way he smiled at me when I was vomiting in the hallway.

I'm guilty of homicide. I am fully fucking culpable of homicide, and it doesn't matter that I didn't mean to get my ex killed. It doesn't matter that I didn't want him killed. I gave the Joker the information he needed to kill the man, and he did.

They are going to fucking arrest me, and I deserve it for being so fucking stupid.

I can't go to work and see him. I can't stand to see it on their faces—the whole asylum thinks I'm guilty. They think I belong to him, that I put him up to it or that I'm so weak and so stupid that he was able to play me.

They would be right. He fucking played me and I let him do it.

I have no idea what to do about any of this.

Even if I waded into traffic or jumped off the roof, I'd simply confirm my involvement by leaving such dramatic proof of my guilty conscience.

Is there anything I could do that isn't proof of my guilt?

I had no fucking idea he would have my ex killed, but I should have known he would do something with the information he was getting from me. Why wasn't I more careful with him?

I ended up staring at my bedroom wall until the sound of my roommate closing the front door shocked me back into awareness. If I had gotten up and gotten dressed as soon as the door shut, I still would have been an hour late to work.

When I called in sick for the day, the secretary called me "ma'am."

She has never, not since I got hired there, been anything resembling polite to me.

What the fuck is happening to me? What is happening to my life?

I thought I was going to have a heart attack when someone knocked on the door. I'd sat there for four hours without moving and I didn't realize it.

When I hobbled over to the door, stiff from sitting, I expected to open it to the GCPD goon squad. I actually started reaching forward to make it easier for them to cuff me because I deserve it. I deserve to be arrested. I should have known better than to talk to him about myself at all. Why did I let him maneuver me into bribing him with information about myself?

Instead, there was a riot of tiger lilies in a vase on the doormat. No card, nothing but the lilies. The delivery guy was gone, the hall was empty and oddly quiet.

The lilies have to be from him. Why? Why would he send me flowers?

What the fuck does he want from me? I'm not his fucking girlfriend. I won't be his fucking girlfriend. He doesn't love me. He doesn't love anyone.

He's already ruined my reputation. He got his moment of emotional vulnerability. He got to see me throwing up. What more could he possibly want?

I have to figure out how to get rid of him. I have to figure out how to make him leave me alone.

I closed the door on the lilies, left them sitting there. I didn't want to touch them, then I realized what it looked like, those lilies sitting on my doorstep.

They look like guilt.

I bought them in and threw them away, but I could still smell them. The apartment smelled like flowers. I didn't even think lilies had a smell but they do—sweet. Cloyingly sweet. And now he's everywhere in my apartment. Those lilies are sickly-sweet little orange explosions, pollen like his fingerprints all over my home.

I'm fucking panicking. I am fucking panicking, and it's not helping, but I can't seem to calm down.

How did he get the address? How does he know where I live? How did he find me?

He's invaded my space. This is my space. Mine. He can't have it.

What the fuck was I thinking? How did he get under my skin so easily? I knew what kind of man he was. I'm a professional. I knew what kind of man he was and how manipulation works.

Jesus, if I can't figure something out, I might as well jump off the roof. I have no idea what he has planned for me, but I'm pretty sure that killing myself will probably be better than whatever he has planned.

I just… I can't do this today. I guess I will have a drink, not that it will do me any good.

Who knows, if I get drunk, maybe I'll feel good enough to cry.


	11. Chapter 11

My little bunny has refused to show up at Arkham for the last week. Smart bunny that she is, she's figured out that they won't fire her easily. No one wants to risk offending me if they can help it.

It's amazing what a little selective terror can do. It amazes me the public thinks I'm random, as if I do what I do for no reason, as if I could have neither reason nor plan. As far as they're concerned, there's nothing to object to in the world's slow, sick lurch into the future as long as they manage to eat, sleep, fuck, and stay entertained.

I always have a plan.

What they don't realize is that the world is random. I don't have to make anything more random. I merely go along for the ride as my plans change. Order is fragile, and I've learned to go along with entropy. Chaos favors me because I, unlike the local black-wearing boy scout, know how small a nudge it takes to start a chain reaction and I'm not interested in stopping the inevitable.

Where there's humanity, a chain reaction is waiting to occur. Destruction is the boot print of humanity.

The kind of person too stupid to figure out that I have a reason for my actions deserves to be mislead. Hell, I'll let them do that to themselves most of the time. I can't stop them from being idiots, but I can punish them for it. And it's entertaining to watch them lie to themselves. Ever so often, they come up with something especially funny in the process.

My favorite so far is that the universe owes them happiness, or even gives a shit about them at all. Why the fuck would the whole goddamn universe pay attention to a microscopic arrangement of carbon on a speck of a planet?

Anything that breaks the law seems random to the public, let alone the kind of lessons I have in mind. Even a harmless little joke is enough to wet the pants of news crews all over the city—a few drugs in the water fountain, an exploding package or two, and you'd think the world was coming to an end.

Hilariously enough, if they don't expect it, it automatically becomes "terror" and I automatically become a "terrorist," as if my goal was to get them to remember a few political slogans or show them the error of their ways.

Terrorism assumes they'll learn, which any amount of reading history would cure. With very rare exceptions, people don't learn from their mistakes, they just dig in further and keep making them. No point in trying to teach the larger public, though I do like to think of what I do as lessons.

I'm just not holding my breath for a public breakthrough in any sense of the word public. I might embolden a few of the lurkers. It's my own optimism shining through even though I know better, my private little foolishness—there's bound to be one or two out there somewhere.

As for the rest….

Dear Gotham, I want to smash you entirely for being so many useless sacks of shit. I want to punish you, not make you chant along to whatever the next sticky little thing lodges itself in the public's goldfish memory.

If they knew even half of what old Bats had foiled over the years, they'd probably all die of shock. All the Chicken Littles have no idea how close their skies have come to falling while they run in circles, screaming uselessly.

The illusion of safety is important to the good people of Gotham, a point that is not lost on even the kind of dull minds that they pay to guard us. When the reporters and cameras come through, the guards are stern and the warden talks about safety. It's a game we play with the public, this game where the prison contains us and they can rest safe in their little beds.

For those of us who are well-connected… well, let's just say the guards are careful not to be too curious as long as we let them appear to be in control while the world is watching. Even the warden, despite his delusions of grandeur, has learned to behave himself.

Old Bats keeps lecturing the guards and warden when he returns us to our cages, for all the good it does. I'd like to hope that even he understands the inevitability of corruption by now. Take a hint: money and terror make opportunity, and there is no such thing as incorruptible man. Even you, Bats, have something I can use to make you dance.

I will find it, oh yes. We're too alike for you to not have some of the worms that burrow in my heart.

I will find it and you will finally understand that the precious "good" citizens of Gotham you think you're serving are a figment of your imagination.

But he keeps lecturing, no matter how often we escape. I can only conclude his helmet is too tight.

Back to the problem at hand: my bad little bunny. I'm not sure if she's daring me to tell, if she's just too depressed or overwhelmed to come in to work, or if she's testing me to see what I'll do. If she doesn't have the spine for this, it doesn't bode well for my other plans, but I can always give her a little more spine the fun way.

After all, as my little cupcake is going to find out, things could always be worse. And she will pay for delaying my plans.

I need her to show up. When she is seen exiting the prison on my arm— never let it be said that I have no sense of theater—it will be the death blow to her reputation in the world at large. After a bit of a makeover, I'll parade her all over my little object lessons for Gotham and no one in the entire world will believe she was anything less than a willing part of my plans.

I said I was going to break her fingers until she lets go. She'll never get within spitting distance of "good" again as far as the public is concerned, and where the dumb masses go, so will her opinion of herself. Egos are so fragile, and she's had a whole life of learning to echo the monkeys around her.

It's time for a new set of monkeys for my darling: rabid, vicious, carnivorous monkeys to make a carnivorous girl out of the frail little thing she is now. But we must do something about that librarian look she's currently wearing. She's so unfinished right now. Practically mint-condition, with that new student smell: old books, debt, and uncertainty.

I have a certain theme in mind: a harlequin for my Harley Quinn. Harleen Quinzell is an unforgiveable name to give to any child. But a harlequin… a harlequin could do anything, could be anything, including the special toy of the Joker.

Outside in, puddin'. I'll be making you over from the outside in, as soon as I can get you to go along with the plan. And since you've forced my hand, puddin, I'll be forcing yours.

* * *

I was half-hoping Arkham would just fire me if I stopped showing up, but they won't. It's been a week and they haven't fired me, or even communicated with me at all. No calls, no emails, nothing. Just the sound of my roommate leaving in the morning, coming back in the evening, and the empty hours between.

I've been hiding in my apartment like a child hoping the boogeyman will go away.

He won't. He won't go away and he won't be ignored.

When I woke up this morning, someone had painted his name and mine inside a heart on the alley wall across from my bedroom window. The spelling is terrible and the letters are crudely formed—the person who painted it must have barely finished K-12. The whole thing is horribly junior high, but effective.

It's a hell of a threat—if I don't come back, he'll punish me by going public. He is fucking destroying me and I have no idea why. I'm going to lose my job if this becomes more public, so it can't just be because I work at Arkham. I'm not going to be of use for anything after I get fired.

Unless … Oh Jesus Christ, what if he is interested, actually interested in me?

What the fuck does interest even mean to a man like him?

I stood there for I don't know how long, staring at the names. I don't have any paint to cover them up, and I'm sure at least some of my neighbors have already seen them. The alley doesn't face the street, so it isn't as obvious as it could be, but it doesn't matter.

He's made this thing between us, whatever it is, public. Now it's not just the people at Arkham who know, it's my neighbors. I have no idea if they'll do something about it. I have no idea if someone in this building lost a loved one to the Joker's idea of a joke.

I can only pray he hasn't broken out of Arkham again, because whatever he's after with me, the last thing I want is to be somewhere I can't put bars between the two of us.

What can I do to discourage him without getting killed or without it becoming more public?

What was he even interested in, in the first place?

I went back over my notes. We had the longest discussions about money and inequality. Maybe that means he has some poverty in his background? If I start being tone-deaf to issues about money, maybe he'll become subtly discouraged. We also talked a lot about social compliance. Maybe if I start acting like compliance is important or as if I enjoy it, he'll lose interest.

I can only pray that he won't keep doing shit like this to get my attention. I could fucking die because I won't go see him.


	12. Chapter 12

My little bunny did come back, as anticipated. She was shaking with rage when they brought me to her. Don't get me wrong, she's definitely afraid, but she's decided to confront me about it instead of just folding immediately.

This is a _fantastic_ sign. If rage motivates her, it's a damn sight better than pretend compliance or terrified compliance. Honest rage is a really easy tool to use. It narrows what the person can notice down into obsession, which means that anything outside the scope of her rage might as well be invisible.

The trick is going to be convincing her to point all that rage somewhere else, at someone else, so that she obsesses about them instead of what I'm doing to her.

I didn't do anything so stupid as ask her how she was feeling or what she'd been doing when I sat down at the table with her. That just gives her an opportunity to aim her rage at me. Instead, I told her it was good to see her, and it was, despite the arm-twisting I had to do to get her to see me.

My god, she must have come within inches of having a heart attack or stroke. She went pale as a sheet, then red in blotches all over her body, holding her breath with what was probably the effort of trying not to scream at me. I just watched, with my calmest expression—if I don't react to her rage, it's more confusing for her.

It's also a great deal more amusing for me.

She cleared her throat and looked briefly up at the cameras around us, as if reminding herself they were there and that she couldn't scream. Then she gave me a nonsense answer, some polite formula she probably memorized as a child.

I can practically see the pulse in her neck, hammering away.

Then her eyes narrowed, and she started trying to sell me on social compliance.

If I actually thought she meant it, I'd be irate. But my bunny darling hasn't learned to lie well yet, and she was far, far too emotionally vulnerable to our previous discussions of the problems with compliance. I refuse to believe she's flipped that easily from the woman I was talking to just a few months before to this.

Just to fuck with her, I agreed with everything in my most polite, reasonable tone. Of course social compliance is important. Of course getting along with others is important. Of course everyone wants 2.5 kids and a house in the 'burbs. Of course I should desist in all my object lessons.

I even added this, just because I'm pretty sure she's feeling a tad paranoid: of course I should stop pestering her.

I could see her knuckles whitening on the table as I answered, flinching with my lies. That last one hit her like an uppercut—here I am, on camera, referring to doing things to or with her away from Arkham. I can't help but tease her on that one, just the same way she can't help but overreact. No specifics on camera, though. I'm going to let her hope that much will stay hidden.

It won't. But that's what makes blackmail work, the hope that something terrible can stay hidden.

All her reactions and sudden change of heart told me that she was trying to have a contest of wills. If I were a betting man, I'd say she's trying to either get me to lose my shit on camera or to discourage me from being interested in her.

Smart bunny, but not smart enough. I have never lost my temper on camera with these people, and she certainly can't make me by trying to wrestle me into it. To be completely blunt, I don't fucking care enough to bother.

Or perhaps she thinks I'm stupid. I suppose I should be insulted, but it's beneath me.

She couldn't make me react, and after half an hour or so, realized she couldn't. As she was leaving, I tossed it after her: "I'm so looking forward to seeing you again."

She stumbled on her way out.

I hate to leave this much of it on her shoulders, but I have to be reactive at this stage. I need her to feel compelled to keep showing up, to keep trying to compete with me. The more emotionally intense these sessions get, the more evidence stacks against her and the more emotionally involved she gets with me.

The old adage is true, you know. There's a damn thin line between emotions when they get this intense. As long as my little bunny is feeling something strongly, she can be coaxed to love me strongly.

If necessary, I'll keep blackmailing her until she starts providing her own incentive to come back. I'm betting that my bunny hates to lose, and she certainly can't afford to lose this one. I've been watching her lose in all those little social interactions with the guards and her colleagues for months. She's sick to fucking death of losing to people, and the stakes have never been this high, probably ever in her life. With a little luck, she'll keep coming back and trying to win.

I haven't played this enjoyable a game in some time. I get caught up in my big lessons, and don't usually get to be so hands-on, to mold a personality myself instead of punishing the great masses for their stupidity.

When she's good and intensely involved, I'll stage my little break out, arm in hers.

Who knows, she may not even realize she's lost as we leave.

I can promise you she'll figure it out over time.

* * *

I can't let myself get angry around him, I can't. I can't let myself be this emotional. All I'm doing is handing him something else to poke me with. He has more than enough shit to poke me with already.

Jesus. How the fuck am I supposed to act calm around him? How am I supposed to pretend I'm not being utterly destroyed, to pretend I don't know that he's ruined my life?

I really thought I was going to faint in session with him. My god, I thought I was pissed before I came in. Watching him blandly agree with me, nodding away at everything I said like a fucking puppet, all while smiling in this poisonously sweet way that slowly grew more and more malicious—I could feel my blood pressure going up, my pulse hammering in my ears. We both knew he was lying, but the fact that he won't admit it, that he won't do anything on camera but make it sound like I'm reaching him makes me feel fucking crazy. I probably look crazy.

When they review the goddamn tapes, it's going to look like I'm in control. He has never acted on camera like he was interested in giving up committing acts of terrorism. If I'm fucking lucky they'll interpret as me successfully reasoning with him or getting through to him. If I'm very lucky.

But I can almost promise they won't be that charitable. I can almost bet that they'll interpret it as proof that I've manipulated him. After all, the MD is supposed to be in control. We have more responsibility and more goddamn ability to constrain their lives.

Jesus, people think criminals are stupid.

Maybe I'll get really lucky and have a myocardial infarction right there.

I only thought people were avoiding me before this. Now they're literally walking on the other side of the hallway, like brushing me on the way past is poisonous. And they stare at me like I'm dirty when they will look at me, with this accusing expression that turns into disgust before they look away. Even during my other scheduled appointments that day, I can barely get three words out of other inmates. They're fucking terrified of me, for the most part—terrified of doing or saying something wrong.

He has to have said something to them, to everyone, about me. I bet I can imagine what he said.

I don't know that there's even any point in asking why. He can't actually care about me, and I can't believe he's obsessed with me or experiencing transference. This is fucking blackmail and I don't have any idea why.

When I got home, there were more lilies on the door step. My roommate is eyeing me like she would a tiger, like I'm going to jump on her and eat her whole. Or maybe like it's catching. She probably saw that stupid message on the alley wall. Her bedroom faces the same way as mine.

My life is fucking over. It is fucking over.


	13. Chapter 13

My sweet little cupcake has taken to wandering the asylum, watching other inmates interact. I think she's looking for a way out, for some kind of leverage on me. She'd have the best luck watching those of us in special care, but it still won't get her out of it. I wonder if she's working up the courage to ask someone for a favor, if she'd be willing to owe someone like Ivy a favor, not that you could get Ivy interested in most things involving humans.

Well, I should say things that don't involve killing humans or making them her slaves. Ivy's pretty keen on thinning out the population when she isn't making errand boys and girls out of them with that poisonous kiss. She looks like she'd be fun to bang, if you could keep her from poisoning you somehow.

My little bunny is even watching Nigma again. She hasn't approached him, but she's watching him. Some of the guards say she's requisitioned all the recordings they have of him, and sits in her office all hours watching it.

Clever bunny. She couldn't provoke me directly, so she's trying to figure out how to get to me indirectly. She's also, whether she knows it or not, contemplating a certain amount of blackmail or at least an exchange of criminal favors. If Cobblepot were in here or Nigma were willing to talk to her, I might be nervous. Cobblepot is damn good at creating organizations and has more favors owed him than I'd want to have to deal with, and Nigma is too damn good at finding people's secrets for either of them to be easily ignored.

Nobody's seen Crane for a long time, speaking of people who she might talk to. Little fucker wouldn't be that hard to beat, but he has a nasty habit of getting people too high to know their asshole from their elbow, which makes taking him on more trouble than it's usually worth. We may all be lucky and he may have offed himself testing one of his drug compounds. He has the most in common with her, just in terms of education, and aside from his obsession with fear, he's fairly rational when he's not high.

It's a real pleasure to watch how quickly she's learning to use illegal methods for getting what she wants. Just goes to show that if you back people into the corner, they're as willing as we are to get their hands dirty, though their tiny little imaginations keep them from doing anything really interesting when they finally decide to break the rules.

I knew she was one of us. It's good to be right.

Glad Nigma isn't talking to her. He's gotten very weird over the last week. Gossip has it that he's spending an awful lot of time by himself, more than normal, in his cell. One of the guards on the fifth floor lost a smart phone recently. I'm guessing Nigma got his hands on it somehow. They searched his cell, of course. He gets searched once a week, every week, but I'd imagine he could find somewhere to store it when he's not playing with it. If he has that phone, he's probably planning his own escape. Or he's planning some kind of mischief. Good thing he hasn't figured out what I did to him. Nigma carries a grudge forever, with all the frustrated passion most people pour into fucking.

The important question here is who she's going to approach. It has to have occurred to her that the regular prisoners aren't going to do shit to me. Hell, we don't even bother to learn their names most of the time. No point—they're peons. If they were anything in particular, they'd be one of us.

If I had to guess, she's going to have to try Nigma at some point, but she'll probably end up trying Cobblepot through one of his known flunkies. Cobblepot, at least among the ignorant public, has a reputation for being reasonable.

We know better. Cobblepot may be mostly interested in business, but that hasn't stopped him from nailing people to the wall upside down and skinning them for making fun of the way he looks. Most of his murders get attributed to someone way more vicious, but that short shit can be downright evil when someone pisses him off.

He's got a real genius for PR for someone who could give a shit if anyone likes him. It's got to be that hideous nightclub he runs—just enough danger for people to feel like they've played in the deep end of the pool without letting them drown.

Ugh. What's the point of danger if no one could die?

The question here is if my bunny can tell the difference between Cobblepot's peons and anyone else's. The files are often laughably wrong, and we aren't about to help them figure it out.

I'm going to have to save my bunny again, but it'll just tie us tighter.

* * *

If I can't discourage him by pretending to hate the things he likes, maybe I can play someone off against him. Owing one of these criminals a favor has got to be better than whatever he has in mind.

At least none of them seem to be interested in a… in something personal.

He just keeps sending flowers. I've never caught the person delivering them, but every single goddamn day there are flowers on the welcome mat.

My roommate gave me her notice. She says she'll be moving out by the end of the month. I can't pay the rent here by myself, and I'm terrified of who might answer an ad to live with me. If he's having me watched, I could end up with one of his minions living with me, which is just asking for trouble. My name is the one on the contract—I thought I was being clever—so I can't move into a smaller place without breaking the damn thing, and I definitely can't afford the fees.

I suppose I'm lucky she told me she was moving out. She spends most of the night somewhere else now, coming home to pick up more clothes and leaving as quickly as possible.

I try to stay out of the apartment myself. He knows where I live. I can barely sleep at night for fear that he'll let himself in. God knows they can't seem to keep him in Arkham if he doesn't want to be there.

I've been watching Nigma at work. He talks to Nigma more than anyone else. If I can figure out why he talks to Nigma, or even what relationship they have, I may have enough information to know who to talk to about him.

I know Nigma doesn't like me. I still don't know why, but I'd be willing to bet he said something to Nigma. He's too calculating and far too manipulative for the whole thing to have been something he didn't have a hand in.

The idea of talking to Nigma scares me. We know he blackmails people—I don't know if blackmail would even work on the Joker. I'm guessing that means he doesn't usually kill people. But he was so angry at me, so very angry, that I'm afraid he's carrying a grudge. We know he carries a grudge. The sheer amount of time he's spent trying to get even with Batman make that very clear.

I don't think Nigma wants to do me any favors.

If I had a way, I'd try talking to Cobblepot. Cobblepot has a reputation for being focused on business, and I'd rather deal with someone who wants a business advantage than someone whose intentions are a mystery, or constantly changing, like Two-Face. Cobblepot will probably want much more than I want to give, but it isn't like I have a choice. I don't have much to give him, anyway, so it isn't like I'm risking much.

Of course, I have no idea how to contact Cobblepot. I don't really know who, if any of the inmates, are his peons.

I suppose I could try to go to his club. I don't think I own anything that would get me in the front door. He's notorious for kicking out the "unwashed masses" and for what they pay me, I definitely can't afford to wear the kind of clothes he insists people wear.

We know Cobblepot is criminal, we just don't know how criminal. He has to know who the Joker is. I wonder if he knows what the Joker is up to with me. If he does, it'll probably get me past the door.

The question is if it'll get me in the front door and out the back in small bags. I have no idea what kind of relationship he has with the Joker.

But I have to do something.


	14. Chapter 14

Cobblepot contacted me immediately when she tried to appeal to him. She's a deliciously vicious little thing, getting more attractive every day. My bunny actually tried to give Cobblepot a blank check, in terms of favors, if he'd just make me leave her alone.

If she knew a damn thing about Cobblepot, she'd have known that giving him a blank check is suicidal. And there's really only one way to "discourage" me, which I'm damn sure my little cupcake knows.

She just tried to have me killed, the sexy little minx.

The only thing that kept her from joining one of his stables is professional courtesy. Cobblepot is usually pretty careful with those of us he knows can blow something valuable up if irked. War is a waste of resources unless he's getting enough of a payoff to justify the expense. War with me would be damn expensive. I've made that fact very, very clear.

I don't think the fact that she's a useful pawn to use on me escaped Cobblepot, so I'd imagine that I'm going to owe him a great deal for this. I don't really give people much in terms of advantage over me. It's shit policy to hand out leverage.

Really, I should leave my little bunny to rot. But we've spent so much time together, and I hate leaving things half-finished. It's sloppy.

She's too useful to end up whoring for Cobblepot. He did say she's a charming piece of ass for an academic. Cobblepot was, if I read his messages right, seriously considering turning her out. I got the distinct impression from the tone of his messages that he wouldn't mind sampling the goods himself.

I don't blame him. She'd make a very expensive whore: blonde, petite, and well educated. He could make a very pretty penny selling her ass to the wealthy, and she is supremely fuckable. She's got that provocative fragility that makes you want to just ruin her, to leave her in a puddle of tears, piss, blood, and cum.

Discouraging him from that was not cheap, and neither is using him as a storage place for errant blonde academics.

My little bunny is going to pay for this later.

I think I'm going to let her stew for awhile in one of his safe houses before asking to get her back, just so that she understands how few alternatives she actually has. Cobblepot apologized for doping her up, but says they have to add a little to her meals to keep her from trying to get out.

Apparently the minx went a little nuts when Cobblepot had her seized, then demonstrated a surprising amount of flexibility when they cuffed her and put her in a storeroom. If one of Cobblepot's flunkies hadn't come in to check on her, she might even have managed to get out of the room—she wriggled through the cuffs so they were in front of her and was trying to pick the lock with a bit of wire.

Don't think for a moment that I didn't notice how flexible she is. It'll be part of how she pays for all this.

I have got to find out what's in her background that it would occur to her to try and pick the lock. The room wasn't all that well fortified in the first place and hadn't been cleaned out since they didn't expect her to know enough to pick a lock or be motivated enough to even try.

Right now, they've got her in a hole in the ground in the warehouse district. She's apparently high enough to babble when they check on her. Cobblepot says she's got a hell of a hard-on for me one way or the other. Sometimes she babbles about killing me. Sometimes she babbles about fucking me.

Either alternative sounds like fun to me. She won't be able to kill me, but she's welcome to hate-fuck me while trying.

I told Cobblepot that they're welcome to rough her up a little if she gets lippy or tries to escape again. They can't put her in the hospital, but if they have to break something to get her attention… Well, as long as they don't break her face or her spine, I told them to go ahead.

She just has to heal cleanly.

* * *

I don't know what day it is. I've passed out a handful of times since I went to the Iceburg Lounge. I know they're drugging me, probably in my food. The effects are euphoria and lethargy, which means it's something in the opioid family. Feeding it to me is not the most effective way of administering it, but it's certainly easy enough to do and it doesn't leave track marks.

I don't know what they have planned for me, but apparently they want to leave me relatively unmarked.

The room is surprisingly comfortable for a prison—double sized bed, small bathroom, thick steel door, and my food comes on disposable plastic plates that they watch me use and then remove.

I tried to keep a fork once and they stripped me, the bed, and every piece of furniture in the room finding it.

I tried not to eat and they sat on me and held my nose until my mouth opened, then stuffed it with drugged food. One of them stroked my neck like you would a dog, until I swallowed.

I tried to run past them once. I've gotten in fights before, a long time ago. Too long. It had been too long since someone punched me, and it shocked me into freezing up. They could have hurt me badly, but the big bastards that they send in to feed me just smacked me around long enough to leave big, nasty bruises on my stomach and back, then put me to bed.

They look bored most of the time. The one that beat me enjoyed it. I can tell that he wants me to try again, to give him an excuse. When I don't, he looks disappointed.

It's fucking terrifying.

I can't hear much around the edges of the door, but I don't think this room is anywhere with a lot of people.

I can feel myself changing. I'm so alone between feedings, and some tiny part of me has started to crave the food and the drugs in it, the way it makes everything warm and fuzzy.

If they make a junkie out of me, am I strong enough to resist when they start withholding the drug to get me to do things?

What the fuck was I thinking? How could I have thought that they'd just let me walk out, or that the only thing I was risking is getting shot?

This is a whole different world. A completely different world than I thought I was in.

After the third time I passed out, I woke up with Cobblepot sitting on the edge of the bed. When he saw that I was awake, he took a great deal of pleasure in telling me what I'd done wrong—as he put it, if I had been lying, I would have made a good whore. If I had been telling the truth, and apparently I had, I was valuable as a pawn.

He's been in communication with the Joker. We had no idea how much they talk to each other, how much they seem to gossip. We assumed they had little territories, that they didn't pass information between themselves or, for that matter, cooperate on anything.

There's a whole network here. They apparently communicate extensively, and have no problem communicating even when they're in institutions. Our rules mean shit to them.

When he was done telling me what I did wrong, Cobblepot put his hand on my thigh and told me I was there until the Joker sends for me. I have no idea if he intended to rape me or if he just likes to scare me, but I couldn't stop myself from screaming.

It was only a little scream, tiny really. I keep telling myself that it's okay to scream, that anyone would scream, but I know exactly how vulnerable it makes me sound.

Cobblepot thought that was fucking hilarious.

He laughed so loudly that his bodyguards ran into the room to check on him. When he finally left, he told me it didn't have to be so bad, that he could make things very comfortable for me.

I had, he said, alternatives.

I wanted to crawl up the fucking wall.

And then he left.

I've never been so happy to be alone my whole fucking life.


	15. Chapter 15

I let her stew for two months—long enough to stop hoping for release but short enough not to have ruined her spirit. She's been high pretty much the whole time, so I'm fairly sure she's got a lovely addiction started.

I'm actually curious to see whether she'll break it by herself or if daddy will have to step in.

They gave her a clean set of clothes and dropped her off in front of her apartment building. She's been gone long enough to ensure that her landlord rented her place back out. Wish I'd been there to see her face when she realized that her apartment was gone. I don't think she still has access to her bank account, either. I'm fairly sure she's been declared dead, or at least officially missing.

I did make sure she'd be let back in here, though.

Proving she ain't a dumb bunny once again, she came straight to Arkham. A reasonable and completely correct assumption, that I am responsible for all of this. I am, and it's been great fun. I don't mind saying that I was quick to get up to the interview room when the call came.

She'd dropped at least ten pounds. She wasn't big in the first place. She's gaunt now, could not be more fragile looking if she tried.

It's incredibly sexy.

I wasn't sure what she'd say when she saw me. I don't think she was either. Honestly, I think she's still slightly high, or just in shock. After that first moment of her staring at me, she lunged across the table and grabbed me by the incredibly ugly orange jumper they make us wear.

She startled me. I didn't think she had it in her, but apparently she is willing to get her hands dirty if she gets pushed hard enough. She froze there, with her fists knotted in my jumper, feet dangling off the edge of the table, not a prayer of enough leverage to do much harm.

I'm pretty sure she surprised herself, but to be fair, she was pushed to it. Her face was inches from mine. As far as the cameras go, this is all the proof any legal team will ever need that we have a relationship.

If I let her go, she's going to run. I cannot, cannot let her go from here alone. She has no home, no bank account, her job is hanging by a thread, and I'm damn sure she can't go back to her family. I've destroyed everything else in her life. I have to be her only alternative, and she's more than smart enough to realize it.

I hadn't planned on her going to someone like Cobblepot, so my plans are going to have to be bumped up. I wanted to make this public, to time it with a loud, violent break out so that Gotham would be able to witness her walking out of one life and into another, but I'm just going to have to roll with things the way they are.

And I couldn't resist. The moment, her expression, the fact that she was practically laying on the table, vibrating with anxiety—it was perfect.

I asked her, with every last little bit of sincerity I could fake, if she was all right, if she had somewhere to go.

I could almost hear something breaking in her head. I'm pretty sure she meant to bite me, but I kissed her instead.

She melted into a small blonde puddle. I'm not stupid enough to think it's quite lust and I know she doesn't love me. I think she's just worn down, but I'll take it.

The guard on duty came in at that point, then backed very quickly out of the room, leaving the keys in the lock. I don't think she even noticed. I made that kiss fairly convincing, and since I've been putting off this moment for the better part of a year, I had plenty of heat to spare.

When I leaned back, she looked completely stunned. Good enough for now, and certainly good enough for her to be suggestible. She handed me the keys when I told her to, which let me get out of the stupid cuffs.

We won't be able to leave with style, but we're leaving. Arkham is riddled with passages. It's been a fort, a home, a military installation, a hospital, and now a hospital and prison, and it's practically honeycombed with hallways and exits that no one uses any more. Those of us who spend time here have practically become historians, combing through old plans and records, and offering little favors for crude maps drawn by inmates over the years. They still haven't sealed all of them up, and they won't finish doing it any time soon.

The contractor is making a small fortune to work slowly and leave a few open.

I grabbed her hand and dragged her to the nearest one. A screwdriver snagged from a kit and a broken key later, we were in one of those cobwebbed passages.

She started to struggle then, far too late to get away, and I had to knock her out. I'd rather not have, but we needed to get off that damn island. There's a cave on the northwestern shore that usually holds a boat or two, and luck favored me. Cobblepot's going to take it out of my hide, but I did let them unload the drugs before I took the boat.

I don't want to owe him any more than I have to.

And then, with a roar from the diesel engine, I excised her entirely from all the boring bits of her life. She's mine now, and it's time to start teaching her what that means.

* * *

My apartment is gone. My framed diploma is gone. My favorite coffee mug, the one that said psychiatrists do it to your head is gone. My favorite sweaters are gone. My bed is gone. My files are gone.

My landlord was incredibly surprised to see me. He thought I was dead, then he started yelling at me about the fees and back rent I owed him. He said he sold my stuff after the first month at one of the local flea markets, and burned the rest.

The only things I own are the clothes on my back.

I just… I had to confront him. I had to say something.

No, I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.

I don't deserve this. I didn't do anything, or at least anything that deserved this.

That son of a bitch sat across from me like butter wouldn't melt in his goddamn mouth and asked me if I was okay. I can't even describe what happened—it was like being on fire, like being in a wreck. I was over that stupid metal table in the interview room before I had the chance to decide, or even to think about those fucking cameras and what anyone watching would think.

I wanted to rip him to pieces, to wipe that pretend sympathy off his face and hear him screaming.

I still don't know why I stopped. I was laying across the table, I'd knocked a shoe off and torn a button from the ugly blouse they gave me. I was dirty, and tired, and so angry I really thought I was going to kill him, and I stopped there.

I think I really did want to bite him. Bite him. Like a child or some kind of animal. All that goddamn education, all those goddamn years learning how to be an academic and I tried to bite my patient.

And then he kissed me and I…

I don't even know how to…

I don't know what to say. I don't know how to explain it. I don't understand any of this at all. I don't understand how I could go from being so angry to being…

I'm going to make myself be honest. I have never been that hot in my entire life, and I hate myself for it. Every time I think about that kiss I want to dry heave.

It scrambled my head. That's the only explanation I can think of for why I gave him the keys when he asked me to, why I let him tow me out of the room. It's like everything in my body was on auto-pilot and he was driving.

I couldn't think at all until we got to that old door, and then, as soon as I realized what was happening I screamed and went to run. There was this explosion on the back of my head, not even pain, just the sensation of force, and then nothing until the sound of a diesel engine by my ear woke me up.

That son of a bitch knocked me out. Does he not know how dangerous that is? He could have killed me, or caused serious brain damage. I could be bleeding in my skull and he doesn't seem to care.

I had to sit up carefully.

When I looked behind me, Arkham's lights were tiny.

I don't know where he's taking me.

He's taking me to hell.


	16. Chapter 16

Our first stop, after the docks, was one of my safe houses. I keep a few caches around the city, as well as my own organization. They know I've been in Arkham, but they probably don't know I've escaped. Can't imagine the warden wanting to make that public.

I couldn't wait to get this terrible jumpsuit off me and the nasty polyester clothes off her. I haven't ordered her any clothes yet, and she's way too small to wear my clothes, but that beige blouse, black skirt combination has got to go.

She put up a fight at the docks, bolted immediately when the boat stopped at one of the piers. I had to grab her by the hair to stop her. The longshoremen unloading considered helping her, but not seriously enough to take me on. I spend a fair amount of my downtime in Arkham working out, and I've always been good at exuding my willingness to gouge someone's eye out and make them eat it. I towed her along the docks by the hair, then by the arm to my hidey hole.

It ain't much, just a studio apartment paid through a handful of false connections, but it has a shower, a bed, and the kind of clothes I prefer to wear. She took one look at the bed and tried to claw my eyes out. I threw her in the shower fully clothed to let the water warm up and shock her out of her imitation of an angry cat.

She gasped and hissed at me like a feral cat. It really was adorable.

She hissed again when I got undressed and got in there with her, but she didn't say anything while I was getting rid of those godawful things she was wearing. She slapped my hands a few times, then I slapped her and she stopped.

My little Harley-kins spent the rest of the shower staring blue murder at me, even while I was washing her hair. I don't think she bathed most of the time she was stuffed in Cobblepot's little holding cell, and she was probably wise not to. I wouldn't put it past the little bastard to have taped it.

Bunny girl is completely adorable—pink and flushed and blushing madly the entire time. She has the look of a gymnast or something like it, the heavy core muscles of someone who does some kind of tumbling. It explains her flexibility, but I still need to find out where she learned to pick a lock, or even why it would have occurred to her. Even as scrawny as she is right now, with the soft layer those two months put over her core and the boniness of the rest of her, I am not at all disappointed with my choice. High, tight little breasts, wiry arms, muscled thighs—we're going to have a lot of fun, especially after a little retraining.

She tried to kill me again when we got out of the shower, this time with the towel. It was novel, and I have to admit I'm impressed with her initiative. She actually had to jump on top of the countertop to reach my face and try to cram the towel down my throat.

My little bunny was definitely not afraid to use the rest of her body as leverage, either. She wrapped her legs around me hard enough to bruise my ribcage and actually managed to get the corner of the towel in my mouth before I took it away from her.

I don't know if she realized it, but the only thing she's doing by trying to kill me is getting me hard. Something about wrestling them for it has always done it for me, especially if I manage to overpower them.

Since I have something like sixty pounds on her and a foot or so of height, that contest was never particularly urgent. It's really the culmination of the last year or so of pulling her chain, so if I needed to get cranked—and I didn't—getting to act it out would have done it for me.

I put her down on the bathroom counter hard. She bit something on the inside of her mouth hard enough to cut, and when I kissed her I got a mouthful of it. Didn't bother me. You have to swallow more than a mouthful to get nauseous, and while she did try to bite me again, it faded underneath all that tension I've been cultivating.

This didn't mean I let my guard down, because I'm guessing my little bunny-girl is a good liar when she's motivated to be, but when she wrapped her arms around me, it was tempting to go ass-over-stupid and forget what stage of the relationship we were in. That doesn't usually happen to me, so I admit that I was a little distracted.

You try to keep your full concentration with someone warm, wet, and squirmy rubbing themselves against you after a year of picturing drilling them into the ground. It does not get any easier, let me tell you.

When she started to try and choke me, I admit I got angry for a moment. I picked her up and tossed her at the mirror, cracking it. I don't think anyone has ever been this rough with her, because she actually teared up, looking at me like I killed her dog and burned down her house.

She did start crying when I tossed her on the bed, but this is really where all those lessons about being confusing came in handy. I rolled her over and started kissing the bruises. She went stiff, then red, then limp, then red again, and started to smell like someone interested in being there, that weird mix of ocean and sweet you get when someone just got hit with a heavy load of pheromones.

She stopped struggling then, which let me start gentle. Little object lesson there—she's got to feel responsible, and it's going to make forcing her later that much more fun. Starting gentle makes her have think about how I'm guessing she currently feels, if the smell is any guide.

When I got there, she was really, really wet. War's won on that front. She is fully turned on by the whole thing, which makes her mine.

I demonstrated the fuck out of that for several hours, at least half of them with her head pushed to the mattress. It's a nice view, and it makes a point.

She's not my equal. She's not my lover, or my partner, or any of that love-struck bullshit people like to tell themselves about their relationships.

She's my bitch.

But mostly, she's mine.

* * *

A few more feet and I would have been around that corner. A few more fucking feet, and I would have been out of his sight for a second, long enough to hide behind something and try to sneak away.

Why didn't any of the men unloading trucks help me? Why didn't anyone do anything?

Didn't they see him dragging me by the fucking hair, like a caveman?

Didn't they see him dragging me by the arm?

He tossed me in the shower, under the cold water. It was fucking freezing. He laughed at me when I hissed at him, like there was something funny about the whole goddamn thing.

If there had been anything, any goddamn thing I could have used to kill him right there, I would have. Instead, that son of a bitch took his clothes off and got in the shower with me. I thought I was going to have a panic attack.

I should have expected this. I should have expected, if he's been willing to go this far, that he'd want…

I barely even remember him taking my clothes off. He's very efficient at it, like he's had practice. So much practice. Even with me slapping him, the whole thing must have only taken a few seconds. Somewhere in that process, he slapped me on the face, hard enough to make my brain ring like a bell.

And then he washed me, for all the world like a lover. I felt like a ping-pong ball, bouncing between the urge to murder him and that same, stupid heat. He was so gentle, so very gentle, and it was confusing as fuck, like he was peeling something off me, or just pulling something out of me.

Then he pulled me out of the shower and started to dry me off, still being stupidly gentle.

I panicked. I really did. You think you're going to fight, you think you're going to stand firm, but he's so good at confusing me. I wasn't me. Do you understand me? I wasn't me, that thing he was pulling out of me wasn't me.

It can't be me. You don't understand. It can't be me.

I'm pretty sure I tried to stuff the towel down his throat at that point, the whole time with that terrible, animal warmth sapping me away and leaving someone else.

He pushed me down on the counter hard enough to make me bite a piece out of my cheek. I tried to spit it at him, but he kissed me and I just flew to pieces for a moment.

Then I tried to strangle him.

You don't understand. I was going away, going far away, and someone else was taking my place. I was so grateful when he threw me at the mirror. It cleared my head for a moment, let me see past that haze he is so goddamn good at making.

I won't talk about the next few hours. I won't.

I don't understand him. I don't understand how this became, how I became….

Why?

I can't ask why. I can't ask why he kept pulling that warmth out of me, what kind of fucking sorcery he was using that made me be someone else.

I'm grateful he kept my head pressed to the bed. It reminded me what he was doing.

It reminded me what this is.


	17. Chapter 17

I ended up putting her in one of my shirts, which might as well be a dress. No underwear, though. No real point in it anyway, and we have to go shopping. She won't look at me. She won't even look in my direction, which is just hilarious.

Childish, too. I am a nightmare that does not care if you're looking at me.

After I got dressed again, I used one of the phones I keep here to make a few calls. We're going to need to be bunkered down together for a little while to get her used to the situation, and this hole in the wall does not suit. I also need to get her dressed in something a little more like Harley and less like Harleen, though my shirt is a good start.

And if I don't keep my eye on her, she's going to be right out a window. Her whole body keeps yearning toward the door.

While I was on the phone, she was searching the opposite side of the room with her eyes. There are a few things around here she could use to get away, but I doubt she'll find them. They're fairly well hidden.

When the car I called beeped outside, I scooped her up and walked out with her flailing around like a fish. I specifically asked for one of my sadists as a driver. While she thrashed about giving the entire neighborhood a good view, he was giving her the kind of eye that, if I didn't mean him to scare her, would have made me scoop his eyeballs out and toss them in the bay.

Proving that she does in fact have a few survival instincts, she shut right up when she noticed and tried to cover herself up with her hands. It didn't actually matter to him, of course, but the point was made and she didn't miss it. It could be worse than me. Old Jimmy-boy there doesn't have any reason not to molest her and slit her throat, something he does on a fairly regular basis for shits and giggles. He looks it, too—stocky, evil-looking white guy with way too many scars not to know what the business end of a baseball bat looks like.

I had him drive us to one of my favorite offices—a set of shitty warehouses behind a nice, high concrete fence, in one of those neighborhoods where everyone knows better than to call the police. There's an office overlooking the warehouse floor that I like to use for certain kinds of meetings.

I picked her up and slung her over a shoulder, bare ass out for the crowd. They appreciated it. They also commented on it—a couple of those fuckers had some fairly good suggestions. I'm going to have to keep an eye on them.

When I let her slide down in the office, she tried to run again and I had to slap her around to get her attention. She tried to kill me with her fingernails when she saw what was waiting next to us. I had them bring me up twenty feet of chain, a welding torch, and one of those un-pickable locks.

It was a bit of a struggle, but I managed to get a loop of chain around her waist and lock it. I let her run a bit then, playing the chain out, as I wrapped it around one of the exposed I-beams in the office. There's only two doors in this place. One of them leads back out to my peons and the other leads to a store room.

I got to watch her try them both while I was welding the chain to the I-beam. I might have been worried if she wasn't so hysterical. I don't think she was capable of anything like thought. When she found them both locked, she fell down and started crying like a little child, which was good because I needed the weld to cool.

I let her wind down and the weld cool before I unlocked the door. Business waits for no one, and I had a shit-ton of business to attend to after my stay in Arkham. She makes a fairly adorable office decoration—a small, sniffling blonde in a soiled white button-up shirt and thirty pounds of chain.

When she figured out what the bucket in the corner was for, she tried to empty it on me in the middle of a territory discussion. Half a dozen of my lieutenants got to watch me push her nose in it and paddle her like a puppy. One of them looked a little disturbed, which puts him on my list.

Nobody stays on my list.

I wasn't annoyed with her for more than a few seconds, to be honest. There's something terribly funny about her stomping around, indignant, that just begs for a good round of humiliation in all the best ways.

After that, she just curled up in a corner and watched. I love watching her try to figure out how to escape, but it reminds me that I haven't shown her how far she's sunk yet.

I'm looking forward to it.

* * *

I never understood, I mean really understood, my patients in Arkham. We interviewed hundreds of murderers, and I listened to the interviews while doing research. But I never understood them. I never understood how it is that they could want to murder someone badly enough to actually plan it out and do it.

I understand them now. That feeling, the knowledge and the conviction that you could, that you would love to murder someone. I liked to think of myself as a non-violent person, really. A good person. Someone who was fundamentally different than my patients, who knew their murders as acts of extreme dysfunction that nothing could excuse or motivate aside from severe mental illness.

I want to murder him. With my bare hands. I want to tear him open with my bare hands and shove bleeding bits of his body down his throat until he chokes.

I'm trying to be rational here. I am trying to look at all this rationally as a response to truly extenuating circumstances. I am a psychiatrist and I should be able to rationalize and deal productively with my own emotions.

I still want to murder him. I want to murder him and bathe in his blood and hang him from the ceiling by his intestines.

He carried me up the stairs like a sack of fucking potatoes, ass out, through a mass of fucking human jackals. I like to think of myself as being relatively experienced, but I have never… I would never have even thought of some of the things they suggested.

And then he drops me in a fucking office. An office. A desk. A big fucking table. Chairs. A fucking shipping office. There are mugs on the goddamn desk.

He just stood there, grinning at me, then his eyes slid down.

A fucking chain, a lock, and a welding torch.

I really did try to gouge something out of his face.

He locked me into that chain and welded it to the goddamn beams in the office. The doors were locked, just the two of us in there with all the toxic goddamn gas from welding.

I had a panic attack. I've never… I couldn't think. I just kept trying the doors over and over, and I couldn't get out.

And then, he opened the damn doors and went about his fucking day like I wasn't there.

When I saw the bucket it was… a bucket? A goddamn bucket?

He pushed my nose in it like a puppy, like I'm not even human anymore. And all those strange men and women watched him do it like it was normal. Like there was something normal about a man shoving a woman's face in the mess on the floor and then paddling her like a bad child.

There has to be something I can use to get out. I can't let myself be put in a position to kill him.

I'm afraid I might.


	18. Chapter 18

I had them drag a nice big bed into the office that evening, one of the modern monsters with thick posts for a headboard. I've used it before, so I know the joints are all reinforced in case I need to tie her to it to keep her in there with me.

I also had them bring her a dog bowl full of literal dog chow. It's not the best nutrition for humans, but she can eat it for a little while without too many issues. She threw it at me, which I expected. It's all the food she's getting until she learns to eat it without whining, though, so she'll end up having to clean it all up.

She led me a merry chase around the office before I reeled her in using the chain, spitting and screaming. I pulled her into a hug and she bit me, which made me have to give her a good swat on the head, but she'll learn.

When she stopped struggling, I carried her to bed and tossed her in it. She lay there, stiff and staring, and tried to hop out again when I got in. I think the thing that started me laughing was how dedicated she's being to escaping. She has to know it's futile, but damned if she isn't going to try anything and everything anyway.

The futility is funny, but so is the energy she's pouring into it, the manic hopping and tugging and pulling, like a dog in a too small yard or a hamster in its wheel. Round and round, going nowhere but too driven by panic to stop. I grabbed the chain and wrapped it around my arm, then let her run little circles by the bed for awhile, watching her wear herself out tugging on the same things, trying the same doors over and over but finding no escape.

No doubt this is new territory for her, this animal panic. Academics tend to practically be brains attached to a meat life support—all analysis, no balls, complete or apparent ignorance of anything happening below their ears. The whole normal world is conducted up there for the most part, in rituals of obeisance and pleasantry that are significant only if you don't do them right.

She's spent her whole life memorizing them and performing them on command, working hard as she can to blend right in. I'd be surprised if there was anything in her background that could prepare her for this dumb panic, for how useless all that training to be an intellectual is in this situation. I'm going to let her find that out, let her beat herself up against it so she can't hide from me inside her medical training.

Saves me having to exert myself over it.

I reeled her in when she finally sat down on the floor. She whimpered and dragged her heels, but wasn't much good at resisting me. It's as much will as it is physical. All that panic has exhausted her muscles, but it also exhausted her willingness to resist, at least for now.

It's time for a bit more confusion. I spent the odd hour before she finally passed out petting her head, the chain securely wrapped around my arm.

Obviously, I can't sleep deeply until I'm sure she won't stab my ass with a pen, but I can nap lightly with her. It's a more effective lie than anything I could tell her about feelings, the lie that I trust her that much.

And it's a lie she won't be able to help herself from echoing, given enough time.

* * *

I keep throwing things at him. I can't seem to stop myself.

They bought in kibble. I don't know what else I expected, but it still shocked me. He's really going to go through with this, to treat me like some kind of animal.

I did expect the bed, though. He's made it really clear that he expects to be able to… to use me.

I don't know how to describe the panic. It's like I'm not even really here anymore, everything that is me boiled down to out.

Out.

I knew, foggily, that I was just going in circles. That I'd already tried that door and it was locked, but I couldn't stop myself. I tripped and fell, but couldn't stop myself from scrabbling at the door knob. Somewhere, distantly, I hurt. Fingers bruised. The chain pinched little blue dots around my waist. A scrape on my knee.

I knew they were there, I just… Like a voice screaming in my ears, over and over. Out.

I could hear myself whimpering and panting.

I could hear him. He barked at me, and then he laughed. And laughed. And laughed. High-pitched, cruel gut laughs, shaking that fucking bed and making it creak just a little.

I kept trying until I was made out of lead, until I couldn't move and hit the concrete floor with a flat smack.

And then he pulled me to the bed with that chain and I couldn't keep us apart.

I knew, dully, that he was going to use me again and I couldn't do anything about it, and I just… let go. I let go and things went fuzzy and empty and I went limp.

He petted me like a dog, over and over, and I couldn't stop him. I couldn't do anything but lay there, and it was so soothing. It was so soothing and gentle and I am not a dog.

I will not let him.

It's a lie. I have to remember that it's a lie, but I couldn't keep myself awake.


	19. Chapter 19

The thing to remember about breaking a person in is that it's a process of slow, deliberate atrocity.

I had my idiots bring me a huge breakfast—bacon, coffee, orange juice, toast, fried eggs, oatmeal, and sausage. I don't usually eat this much, and there's no way I could have finished it, but I was making a point and not eating for pleasure.

She woke immediately when I got out of bed, which just reminds me to take my naps elsewhere. She sleeps too lightly to be trusted to stay asleep.

Her stomach growled at the smell, but she didn't move. When I walked around the bed, I could see her staring at the food on my desk. I'm actually not entirely sure when she ate last. From experience I know that the stomach cramps after a few days of starving are fucking excruciating.

Hunger is a useful tool. It takes very little energy to impose and they have to eat to live, so even if they want to be defiant, they'll still end up caving in to save their lives.

Well, usually. She's certainly selfish enough not to suffer from any martyrdom. If she were prey to that particular bit of nonsense, I would never have bought her with me.

I ate it in front of her, slowly, making a huge show of ignoring her. I was half-hoping she'd actually beg for food, but she's still just a little too strong-willed to let me have the display.

Fine with me. This kind of foreplay is always better if they don't give in easily.

I could only get half a plate or so down, but that was fine. She followed the food out of the room with her eyes, teeth embedded in her bloody lower lip. She'd chewed it to bits watching me eat.

This particular office doesn't have a shower, but it doesn't hurt either of us to experience a little mutual privation—it's good for my willpower and it helps me to separate her from her routines. I did my washing up with a hose before dragging her in and giving her a good scrub.

She didn't fight me, which either means that she's given up already or, more likely, she's decided to look for a chance to make it count.

This is pretty much exactly what I want. If that sounds like a weird thing to say, think about it like this: if she's motivated by self-preservation, she'll still have enough autonomy to be useful to me when I'm done playing god with her.

Another common mistake in this process is trying to make a total sock-puppet of your toy. If you manage, you have to do their thinking for them. That shit is boring, as well as liable to cause the girl to poison you instead of trying to undermine you, or to subvert you, or just escape.

I prefer the intellectual pleasure of trying to figure out how she's plotting against me. And I get annoyed enough by apathy without giving myself a living monument to it.

She did go all stiff when I started measuring her, mostly because it involved me bending her over and running the tape measure up the inside of her thigh. I do love provoking a reaction in her.

That librarian costume and her easy embarrassment was an inspiration early on. She has the same stupid monkey instincts as most people—naughty, naughty, mustn't let others see your nakedness and your shame. I decided early on that when I started dressing her, it would be aggressively sexual.

She'll have to feel all those taboos all over again, all those scolding mommies and daddies telling her that her body is dirty. She'll feel dirty, and chaos knows my idiots will make her feel dirty when they see her wearing what I have in mind.

I have to break her of all that shit, all those stupid taboos.

Just think of me as the great liberator of terrified blonde academics.

Besides, the costume and her shame make for nice scenery.

* * *

I don't know what I was doing all night, but it wasn't quite sleeping. When he moved, I was awake immediately. The chain hurt where it lay pressed into my waist all night, I had to pee, and frankly I was a little afraid he'd just start up molesting me as soon as he woke up.

Instead, he called down for food.

I feel like I should have expected this—I should have expected that he'd eat in front of me after I threw the kibble at him. I should have expected that he'd punish defiance, and he's apparently serious about making me eat the kibble.

I should have expected everything he's done so far. I'm a trained professional, a doctor. My specialty is the mind and its disorders. I should have expected him to be exactly what he seems to be, should expect him to do exactly what it seems like he's doing.

It's just that… it's just that you can't quite believe someone would do this to you.

Stupid. So stupid. It's stupid. I'm stupid to believe anything else.

I can't believe he is willing to do this, but there he was eating bacon and waiting for a response. He didn't look at me, but he just looked expectant.

I'm grateful for the pounding headache and urge to throw up that ambushed me as soon as I woke up. Apparently, I am going to go through some withdrawal.

It could be much worse, really, than this. I did a rotation in Arkham's drying out facility. I've seen the hard cases sober up, and this is practically nothing compared to that.

Even if I feel like shit.

At least it gave me something else to think about while he ate. It's amazing how loud the sound of someone eating can be—it felt like he was scraping the inside of my ears as he chewed.

I'm pretty sure I'm hungry somewhere under all this, but I'm not feeling it yet. Just the overwhelming urge to… for a bathroom.

I am _not_ using the bucket in front of him.

He measured me. Clothes? Restraints? What fresh hell is he planning?

I can't stop myself from flinching when he touches me, even when he's being gentle. I just keep remembering him knocking me out. I don't even think he broke a sweat the whole time. Not over knocking me out, and he hasn't seemed to sweat hauling me around like a doll.

It has to be instrumental. He isn't nice enough to be gentle for its own sake.


	20. Chapter 20

That first outfit was a doozy, if I do say so myself.

Just to get it over with, I had them bring a set of crotchless fishnets, a leather skirt just this side of a belt, four inch heels, and a roll of electrical tape. She just stared at me blankly for a moment when I dropped them on the bed next to her. And then she rolled over, as if she could ignore me.

It irritated me.

I appreciate a little defiance, but I didn't get much sleep and the idiots were being idiotic. I'd almost forgotten how goddamn stupid they can be over my stay at Arkham, but those fuckers sure were eager to remind me now that I am back. If I wasn't babysitting her, I'd have strangled one as stress relief. Hell, I think I might strangle one anyway for shits and giggles. The idiots were supposed to have picked up makeup with the outfit, but they were too fucking macho to be seen buying any and my crew does not run high to women.

I just can't imagine why.

I had plans for her lipstick-smeared mouth, and now they're going to have to wait because the idiots are afraid someone might think they weren't manly. It's this kind of thing that makes me briefly envy Ivy. At least when she tells her zombies to do something, they don't worry about whether or not the boys think they're a fucking fruit.

To be fair to myself, while I am a man of iron self-control, I am not made of stone. There's something about her that really gets to me—maybe I'm just tired, but sometimes I look at her and I need to see her cry. And I am not about to let her get away with thinking she can safely ignore me when I want her to do something.

The last time I spanked her, I made it more stinging than anything else—the point was really the humiliation of it, the audience and the fact that I could and would punish her in front of whomever happened to be around. The pain was more mental than physical, and I had more on my mind than just her, thanks to some of the changes in territory while I was a guest of the loony bin.

This time, I was annoyed. The result was less artistry than relief on my part. Really, I should have held back a little more.

But she did look absolutely delicious when I was done. The black eye was small enough, and the handprints on her ass were just sexy as they peeked out from under the edge of that skirt. The crisscrossed electrical tape over her nipples was also adorable, and while I ripped the fishnets getting them on her, it added to the look.

I rather like her bed head as well. I'll probably change her hair during this whole process but it's a nice, grippable length right now.

I think she's still in shock to some extent. After her first startled gasp, she curled up in a ball and simply let me do what I was doing. I had to apply a little force to uncurl her for the fishnets, and again to get to her nipples for the tape, but she sat up and crawled to the edge of the bed fast enough when I told her to.

I told her to go stand in the corner when I was done dressing her. She still looks a bit blank around the edges and her stomach is still complaining loudly, but it's as good a place as any to store her while I'm busy.

I need a nap, but I can't leave her unguarded and the paranoia will do her some good. I sent in one of my least aggressive sadists to keep her company. If he touches her, I'll peel him and dip him in the bay, so he'll probably be a good boy.

Probably.

* * *

Disbelief is a killer. I had trouble believing the dog chow, and I don't know why I didn't see the beating coming.

I was just so angry, so fucking tired of this grotesque fucking train of horrors. And once again, I just… couldn't believe he would do it. I mean, it's one thing to know that someone is violent and something else to realize that they're willing to be violent to you. I just keep remembering all those times he seemed happy to see me, and it makes no sense.

It felt like time slowed down for a moment, or maybe he paused at the beginning. He pounced on the bed and manhandled me over, and then there was this weird moment where we looked at each other. I don't know how to characterize that expression—I could tell he was irritated, but he was also really… gleeful. I could see the decision on his face. Not just him losing his temper, though I'm sure he has some serious anger issues. More… more of his calculated behavior, a conscious and deliberate decision to hurt me because I annoyed him.

In some ways, stupid as this sounds, it made what he did hurt worse. It was that he would decide to do this to me, that it was a thing he would think was acceptable to do to me.

I didn't think anyone would decide to do this to me. Disbelief again.

I can't decide if the feeling of him hitting me lasted forever or went by in a blur. The whole thing seemed to go in fits and starts, like someone was slowing and speeding up time. It's hard to remember anything but snap-shots of his raised fist, or a brief glimpse of the look on his face. I curled up to protect my midsection after he got me in the eye and he let me stay there for awhile but for the reflex to curl to the side with a rib shot.

The whole thing emptied my head, like someone took an ice cream scoop to my brain, leaving this buzzing, flashing emptiness. I just lay there until he pried my arms apart and dressed me, then got up and put those stupid, slutty shoes on and stood in the corner. My stomach was cramping, but the adrenaline made it seem distant. It buried some of the pain, as well—I could tell I was hurt and would be hurting, that it was cold and I wanted to throw up and shit myself, but it was like it was happening to someone else, far away.

He left and sent someone else in. I didn't look, just leaned against the wall with my forehead pressed to the cold concrete. Eventually, I'm going to have to use the bucket, but all I can really feel right now is that same disbelief, like the world has tilted under my feet and I'm suspended over this terrible abyss.

It's true.

Disbelief could kill me.


	21. Chapter 21

When I woke up from my nap, the warden had let the cat out of the bag. Or is it the bat out of the black? Either way, he notified the news I was out again and the city promptly shat itself all over the news.

There's something delightfully ghoulish about the way the talking heads talk about me. Oh, their tone and words say that they are sincerely worried and they just want everyone to be safe, but their expressions are bloodthirsty. Somewhere, a group of reporters are calling each other and making preparations to be able to wake and go on a moment's notice, to cover whatever mischief I get up to.

I hate the little fuckers, but if they didn't exist, they'd have to be invented.

Our relationship is symbiotic. I do something interesting, they report it because the public needs to know, and terror spreads like the plague. Any time I make an artistic gesture, I try to make sure they'll be able to cover it, and they do not disappoint. Honestly, I couldn't do this as efficiently without them.

The news coverage is practically masturbatory—a murder-boner, if you will. Or maybe a homicidal hard-on. A stiffie for stiffs.

It's a nice little confirmation of human nature. As long as you aren't the corpse, it's wholesome, family entertainment.

What's that old saying? Tragedy is my paper-cut. Comedy is when you fall into the sewer and die.

Old Wardie-poo did precisely what I wanted him to, what I spent months slowly introducing evidence for—he blamed Harley.

I had them drag her out of the office door so she could watch the last half of the news, the part where they described her, gave a short and inadequate description of her history, declared that she'd fallen in love and eloped with me, or perhaps even used me to get even with that ex of hers. They laid the entire thing at her feet, then grudgingly admitted that I might have been an active participant in my own escape.

If this wasn't what I wanted, my feelings might be hurt. I might have to visit the announcer for a discussion of what I am and am not capable of.

I was a little worried that she'd be too far gone to actually comprehend it, but she perked right up. She paled, then turned red, then paled again, and before anyone could stop her, actually tried to get to the television. The chain jerked her short and she almost cut her lip on the stairs when she fell.

I'm fairly sure she would have tried to put her fist through the TV if she had been able to reach it.

The noise coming out of her mouth… my Harley-kins has a filthy, filthy mind and apparently a violent temper. If she could have gotten her hands on that talking head, she might just have strangled him with her bare hands. She's mostly naked, enraged, violent, and I'm almost certain she offered to stuff the announcer's tongue up his ass after she ripped it out for him. Picking words out of her scream was a little challenging. There was an amazing amount of noise coming out of such a small woman.

My idiots actually shrank back from her while she screamed. At first sight, she looks like she'd break if you growled at her. Now, she looks like she'd gleefully gut a man and go dancing in the mess.

It's magnificent. I knew there had to be something under there, and how very right I was.

I don't mind saying that my heart went pitter-pat, or as close as that organ gets to ass-over-stupid infatuation. No matter. I was hard, and she was squirmy, red, and mostly naked.

She only got squirmier when I tossed her on the bed. It stinks in here, but I suppose that's to be expected considering what the Penguin's henchmen were dosing her with. Withdrawal tends to empty a person out at both ends.

But, if you'll pardon the pun, I could give a shit.

She's a damn fun ride.

* * *

I don't…. I don't understand why they're blaming me.

No, I do understand. I just cannot imagine why I was so goddamn stupid. I thought this was about me, or about some advantage at the jail, or transference or any other word that could not possibly describe what this was actually about.

I might as well be dead. The whole fucking world thinks I am a criminal, that I am the Joker's… the Joker's whore. Even if he gets bored with me and lets me go, I have nowhere to go. Even if I manage to escape, what the fuck could I possibly do? Where could I go?

I could go to fucking jail, that's where I could go. I'm now a wanted felon, and I haven't done anything. Not a goddamn thing.

And it doesn't fucking matter.

I could feel something break behind my eyes when I heard the news. I swear to god, it felt like something snapped, like I was made out of glass and someone dropped me from the roof to watch me shatter on the floor.

I couldn't stop myself from screaming. Every shit-house thing I ever heard, every goat-fucking, cock-sucking, shit-eating expression I ever heard in all those shitty schools, all the things I grew up hearing when my dad got drunk with his pals, every last obscene thing I'd ever heard pouring out of me so fast that I could hear my voice breaking, vocal-cords shredding. I don't even know that it made sense anymore after awhile, it just kept pouring out of me.

I barely caught myself on the stairs. I had to make the announcer stop. I had to. He was killing me. They were all killing me.

And then the Joker just… God, I wish I could rip my skin off.

It made him hot.

Right there, with my voice gone hoarse, in that stinking room, tears on my face, dirty and filthy and terrifying. He didn't even make me bathe, just shoved me backward on the bed and fell on me. I punched him a good one in the eye, but he didn't so much as slap me back, just…

I want to rip my skin right the fuck off.

The horrible part is…

No.

I'm not going to tell you. I'm never going to tell anyone. I'm going to pretend that never happened until I break down or die, whichever happens first.

And frankly, I hope I die before I have to talk about it.

I might as well kill myself, but I will be goddamned if I don't do something to him first.


	22. Chapter 22

My adorable Harley-kins needs something to keep her peppy. I ain't gonna dose her or anything. She's had more than enough recreational drugs, and I ain't sharing her worship with anything or anyone else. I am, however, gonna give her something else to think about.

I've watched people make knives before. There's a tempering stage knives go through after forging. The metal is hard but super brittle, not unlike my cupcake. To make the knife less likely to break, they bake it for hours or boil it in oil for hours at a lower temperature.

It's the hardness of the metal, you understand. If it is too hard, the first time you stab someone, it'll shatter. If it's too soft, it won't cut.

If I give her nothing but a good hard fucking and spare time, she's going to be a handful of shards. Too much time spent brooding and no chance to succeed, and she'll be useless.

Ditto for too much leiniency. I want a sharp Harley, a Harley that cuts to the bone.

I let her off the chain. She stood there, staring at me, mouth opening and closing like a guppy drowning in the air. And then I pointed to the stairs.

She shot out of the office door. I had to get to it quickly before she managed to get out of the warehouse. While she was trying to push past the mob hanging out in the warehouse, I told 'em about our new game: if they can catch her, they can molest her a little. If they let her out of the warehouse, someone's going to die, but she can run and hide as much as she likes. They can't do any permanent damage to her, but a few bruises between friends is just the price of being easy to catch.

It's good exercise, after all, and my Harley is getting a little soft around the edges. She screamed when she heard me say it, this time sounding like one of the hawks that nest in this neighborhood and fight the gulls over eating their young. It had anger, and despair, and hate, and overwhelming outrage-perfect. Exactly what she needs to survive.

I'll give her this: she ain't a slow learner. Before the idiots could stop gawking at me, she had twisted clear and put twenty feet between her body and most of them. I couldn't resist clapping for her. It's a real pleasure to shape someone so clever.

I'll let them have an hour or so, since she's probably sick from withdrawal. The fact that she won't drink from the bowl or eat the puppy chow will punish her just as much as being slow.

If she faints, I'm going to be just a little bit disappointed.

If she knocks one of the idiots out, I'm going to treat her to real food.

* * *

I don't know how to talk about today. Everything feels... well... like a distant dream. I'm a doctor. I know I'm hungry and suffering withdrawal, that I can't expect to be particularly alert, but I think it's really clear that I'm out of my depth here. I can't help but watch him. My fucking skin crawls when he's in the room, a terrible awareness of him that makes me want to rip it off so that I won't keep feeling him.

I recognize the feeling. I do. My training. I can't help but think it's useless, but I keep clinging to it. Being a doctor lets me step back a little, lets me get away from... from him. And it is useless, because I can't get away from him.

He took the chain off with the most terrible grin, and I could swear his teeth look longer than they should be and all too sharp. There's nothing kind in his smiles, just this overwhelming hunger and scorn. He balanced the chain in his hand like he was weighing it, watching me cower in far too few clothes.

I don't even know why I cower. There's no goddamn point in modesty and I'm pretty sure it arouses him that I... that I would cower.

And then he pointed to the door.

My heart exploded, pulse soaring. I thought maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe he'd decided I wasn't worth it, and even though I don't have anywhere else to go, even though I can't imagine making it more than a few blocks before someone arrests me for public exposure, I had to try.

I jumped down the stairs, more falling than running on those ridiculous heels, before I heard his voice, before I felt the chain cut into me again, like I'd never be rid of it.

A nightmare. This isn't a dream, it's a fucking nightmare. The mob at the foot of the stairs all looked up, faithful dogs, a snarling pack of monsters.

I nearly fainted when he finished speaking. I didn't realize that blood could actually drain from your face, that it would sting and the world would surge up around me, my pulse hammering madly in my ears, faster than the blurred stamp of my heels on the concrete.

They howled, voices indistinct but for malice. I've only ever heard that sound in horror movies. I wish I was in a theater, that this was happening to anyone else. I dived behind a stack of boxes, searching for something, anything, the skin of my back shrieking to match the laughter as they ran after me. Nothing. There was nothing but the steel supports, but I could climb them.

I kicked those stupid shoes off in the face of the first climber. I got him good, too-right as he reached up, when he had the least skin in contact with the steel. He fell off, hit the concrete with a sound like my father's nail flicking a melon to see if it was ripe.

It made them pause, and it's the only reason they didn't pull me off while I was staring at him on the ground, a thin rivulet of blood snaking out from behind his matted hair as the list of his injuries hammered through my head, the sound doom must make.

I am a doctor. I swore to heal, to take no actions which injure or endanger others.

I killed that man.

When they surged back up, angry and spitting, I kept climbing. I climbed until I could wedge myself near the ceiling, fifty feet up in the air, and coiled my arms in the struts. They'd probably win, but I would be able to kick a few in the face and maybe knock them off.

I killed that man.

I've never shook that hard. I cut myself on the struts, but the sting called me back.

I killed that man. I killed him.

I don't know who I am any more.

I don't want to die.


	23. Chapter 23

I could have kissed the little minx out of sheer, unadulterated pride. First time out of the box and she kills a man—with a high heel, no less. Just contrast that with the first time I saw her in a dumpy skirt combo, flat shoes and tattered beige cardigan.

She ain't a mouse no more, that's for sure.

My first time was much less clean, but it was just as sweetly symbolic. I strangled one of my mother's pimps with the belt he used to beat me with, and let me tell you that is not a simple task for a ten year old, even one as big as I was.

I could tell she would do it again. She locked her elbows in the supports, cocked her leg back, and waited for the next hapless motherfucker to try and get her.

That's my delicious little killer, my pretty blond birdie perched high on the ceiling. She's going to have to come down if she doesn't want to faint and slide off, to meet the same fate she inflicted on the bastard cooling near my feet. Considering how well she did, I can be a little persuasive.

I had the idiots go hold up a nice restaurant for a chef, some gear, and steaks. This, at least, they got right. The chef must have put up a hell of a fight, because they beat the shit out of him before they shoved him into the warehouse. Motherfucker was nearly toothless in the front, and I was surprised he didn't shank a few of them from the way he was eyeballing the lot of them. He paled when he saw me, sprawled on my chair.

Naughty idiots, they didn't tell the asshole who he was going to be cooking for.

He didn't faint, but from the look on his face, it was a near thing. I told him what I wanted, and he set up a fair workstation and got to it without any further complaints. I watched her, instead, waiting to see if she would crawl down and live, or stay up there until she fell to the concrete floor.

It took her an hour, but she finally crawled down the beams, giving the room a rather nice view of her ass in the process. She was almost purple from embarrassment by the time she stood on the floor, and then she went pale again looking at the corpse.

Never let it be said that I'm not a good host, when I want to be. I shepherded her to the table I had them drag in, settled her in a chair, tucked a napkin in her lap, and pushed her chair in. Her eyes were on the corpse the whole time, face flushing and going pale over and over.

She ate, though. Surprisingly well for someone in her condition—she tried to start the meal using a fork, but gave up by the third bite. She picked the steak up with her bare hands and savaged it. I could practically see her body taking over so she didn't think herself to death. I don't even think she realized she was eating.

When she'd cleared the plate, I decided what I was going to do about it.

I haven't hunted animals myself—humans, sure. Just not other animals. I'm told that for your first kill, they mark you with blood. From the way she's been staring at the corpse, the gesture is an appropriate amount of violation. I stood, the chair squealing and making her jump, and ran my fingers through the dirt and the blood on the floor. I don't think she realized what I was going to do with it until I was nearly on top of her and it was way too late to run.

I daubed it on her cheeks and forehead, just a rough stripe, and picked her up, throwing her over a shoulder. I told the idiots to let the chef go. He'd carry a tale, another nail in her coffin, and I was about to be too busy to want to be interrupted by their simple pleasures.

She didn't even struggle. I'm sure we're probably at her limit for outrage, for at least a little while, not that it's going to stop. But she's probably going to be a bit passive for a little while.

Long as it doesn't last too long, it's fine with me. Besides, I have my ways of drawing her out.

And as it turns out, a touch of gentleness was just right. I don't think she's come that hard since we started this little process. I could see something breaking behind her wide-open eyes right before she came.

It was incredibly hot.

* * *

I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't


	24. Chapter 24

I don't usually like tears. Sometimes, I resent people for being so easy to break, so quick to roll over and show me their belly like I won't gut them for it. Sometimes it annoys me because it's so easy, such an easy way to pretend you can get away from something that hurts you. But I've worked damn hard for her tears, and she's put up more of a fight than most people, especially people from such a soft background. Her surrender was a foregone conclusion, the question was how long it was going to take to get her here.

I wasn't expecting it to take this long, to be honest.

She woke me up with them. I suppose I should have been annoyed, but I was actually touched. Or at least as touched as I get. She'd jammed her fist in her mouth, and had locked her muscles trying to hide the fact that she was crying. The result was that she was shaking the bed. I don't think she realized how much she was shaking it until I rolled over and she stopped breathing.

I'd been waiting for this. Tears are a sign of surrender, but they're also a plea to the world around us to pay attention to our suffering, because trust me, you never have to cry. You cry to show the world you're hurting.

I had to get a little firm with her to get her settled in my arms. She did not want to unbend, but an irritated growl unfolded her—conditioning again. Obey or get hurt.

And then I held her. She's such a tiny thing that I could have wrapped myself around her several times over. I've seen people do it before, so I stroked her hair.

She sobbed so hard she actually moved the mattress a little and made the bed screech against the floor. I held her until she had nothing left, very patient for me. She went limp afterward. I doubt she had anything left after that day and the fact is that the body is stupid. Even though she knows for a fact that I'm a dangerous son of a bitch, all that petting and patience fools her into thinking she can relax.

And, of course, sustains the illusion of intimacy. Intimacy is so beautifully selfish. Even when she knows better, she'll keep trying to believe I think she's important. Intimacy is the stubborn belief that we're important to someone, and that being important has to be reciprocal.

Which means that I'd better be important to her, if I act like we're intimate.

Which just makes my job easier.

Poor Harley-kins. My poor little baby.

I even kissed her face, as much like a lover in a movie as anything that makes sense. We aren't really the kissing kind of lovers. When she fell asleep, I watched her for awhile, watched her twitching and wincing with her dreams.

She's probably dreaming about me. She's mine awake and asleep.

When I'm sure she's good and blank, it'll be time for a little re-education. We've already started, of course. You can't really un-kill a man. Even though it was in self-defense, it ain't that hard to expand into other motivations.

We all pretty much started out justifying ourselves that way, not that killing needs justification. Society gets its grubby hooks in us early, telling us that murder and violence are bad, that we should let other people take advantage of us rather than do something that bad. So we have to marshal our excuses: "I killed him because he was hurting me," "I killed him because he would have killed me." We understand that we have to plead our case, and there's only a few acceptable ways to do that. And who knows, maybe we'll be excused for it. We certainly have to get used to it, and no one likes to hate themselves if they don't have to. A socially acceptable excuse is a way out of hating ourselves.

And then, we think it's not so bad. It's understandable. It's excusable. It's okay, as long as we hedge our actions in justifications and stay in those justifications. Not that people don't keep drifting, changing their justifications as they go. But as long as there's something they won't do, they believe they're fine.

It's why I have to break her fingers.

There is no bad—I can't kill or harm anyone because it's bad.

There is no good—as long as I don't do this, I'm okay.

There is just the act itself—if I want to do it, I will.

There doesn't need to be any more justification than that. I have my little object lessons for society, of course, but I'm nowhere near delusional enough to be convinced that they always work. People are astoundingly stupid, and while I may feel the need to punish people for it, I'm not stupid enough to think that they'll always learn.

Without the assurance that it will make a difference, all that's left is will. All that's left is I want to. I want to is a more honest and satisfying motivation than any of the other bullshit we tell ourselves. It's the only motivation that has the charm of being completely true.

When I'm done with her, it's all she'll need, too.

* * *

I can't seem to think. My thoughts trickle out of me, and I can't seem to concentrate enough to understand them.

I cried. I didn't mean to cry. I didn't even know I was crying until a drop ran off my nose.

I don't know why I bothered to cry.

I panicked, when I realized I was crying. I had to hide. I had to hide it. He was right there, back to me, snoring.

Panic again.

I can't think.

My fist ended up in my mouth. I had to hide.

My body betrayed me.

I couldn't hide.

He turned over. I expected him to hurt me. He's so angry.

He didn't.

Why?

Why would he do this?

I should be able to step back. I should be able to understand, to name and box this up. All that discipline. All that training. I should be able to keep this distant, should be able to understand.

The dead man on the floor. I promised I would heal. The Hippocratic Oath. I promised.

He's being so gentle. Why? Why is he being gentle?

I'm so tired. I don't understand.

I don't understand anything anymore.

I'm a killer.

I'm drowning.

I'm nothing.


End file.
